Consigning machinery from a plant that is still running

Most people picture a closure when they picture used machinery leaving a plant. In practice the best consigned machines come out of plants that are doing perfectly well: a line was upgraded, a product was discontinued, a second shift was consolidated, and the old equipment is standing in a bay somebody wants back.

These machines are the easiest to sell and they earn the most, for 4 reasons. Nobody is in a hurry, so there is no forced timetable. The machine is usually complete, because nothing has been cannibalized for a plant that is still running. It is often still under power, so it can be demonstrated and recorded. And the people who ran it are still in the building and can answer questions.

The 4 situations

The replaced line. The new line is running and the old one is standing beside it. This is the single best consignment case there is. The machine works, its tooling is present, the manuals are in the office, and somebody can run it before it is disconnected.

The discontinued product. A product came off the range and left its machines and its tooling behind. Often 1 to 5 machines, complete, in a corner, and forgotten. The tooling is usually the part at risk here, because it has no obvious home once the product is gone.

The consolidated shift. Duplicate machines that existed to run a second shift, now surplus because volumes moved. Frequently identical to machines you still run, which makes them straightforward to describe and easy for a buyer to trust.

The bay you want back. Not a disposal decision at all, a space decision. The machine may be perfectly good, and it is worth far more sold to a user than it is worth standing in the way.

Doing it without disturbing the plant

Keep it connected until you have to disconnect it. A machine that can be run and recorded is worth more than the same machine on a pallet with its cables cut, and 2 minutes of video taken before the disconnection travels with the listing forever.

Do the list at a shift change, not during production. The 8 fields and 5 photographs per machine take an afternoon, and they do not need the line stopped.

Ring-fence the tooling now. Dies, change parts, formats, spare rolls, fixtures. Put them with the machine and label them. In a running plant, tooling from a surplus machine gets quietly absorbed into the stores faster than anywhere else.

Copy the software off before the machine is powered down. PLC programs, HMI backups, license keys. On a running plant somebody still knows how, which is not true 6 months later.

Book the removal around your own schedule. Consignment has no auction date, so the removal can wait for a shutdown week, a holiday, or whatever window suits production. That flexibility is a real advantage of this route and it costs nothing to use.

Confidentiality inside a healthy plant

Machinery leaving a working site makes people nervous, so decide early who needs to know and give everyone else a plain, true answer. A listing never names you, your site or your location, and the machine is photographed on our warehouse floor rather than in your bay. There are no buyers walking your plant and no viewings to host.

What to send

Send the list for the surplus machines only, with photographs if you have them and a note of what tooling goes with each. Tell us roughly when you would want them collected. We will tell you which ones we can sell, what kind of buyer we would be selling them to, and what the agreement would cover, before anything moves.