Equipment we survey

Factory Doctor asks about 284 types of industrial equipment across 15 categories. Each type has its own set of questions, because a rating plate does not tell you whether something is worked hard or nursed.

• 122 types

  Production

  The equipment that transforms the product, and the largest part of any register - machine tools, moulding, electronics assembly, weaving, printing, brewing, food processing and the rest. What it holds depends entirely on the sector.

• 9 types

  Surface Finishing & Treatment

  Coating, plating, blasting and cleaning. Kept apart from production because these lines share extraction, chemical exposure and an effluent route, are usually run by their own people, and on a fabrication site are usually the bottleneck.

• 8 types

  Packaging & Labelling

  The end of the line - filling, capping, cartoning, case packing, bagging, labelling and wrapping. Usually the first place a stoppage upstream becomes visible.

• 14 types

  Inspection & Test

  Owned by quality rather than production: optical and X-ray inspection, metal detection, checkweighing, coordinate measurement, leak and functional test. On an electronics or aerospace line this can be a third of the floor, and none of it makes product.

• 11 types

  Materials Handling

  How material moves and where it waits - conveyors, cranes, forklifts, automated storage, palletisers and dock levellers. A different maintenance regime and a different failure consequence from the machines it feeds.

• 22 types

  Process Heat

  Boilers, furnaces, kilns, ovens and dryers, with the steam distribution and heat recovery around them. Often the largest single energy user on a manufacturing site.

• 15 types

  HVAC & Refrigeration

  Chillers, heat pumps, air handling, cold rooms, freezers and refrigeration packs. On a food or pharmaceutical site the cooling is part of the product specification, not just the building.

• 7 types

  Ventilation & Extraction

  Local exhaust ventilation and the fans, hoods, ducting and filtration around it. Where LEV controls exposure to a substance hazardous to health, COSHH requires a thorough examination and test at least every fourteen months for most processes.

• 10 types

  Compressed Air

  Compressors, dryers, receivers, filtration and nitrogen generation. Usually the most expensive utility per unit of useful work, and the one where leakage is the most common avoidable cost.

• 12 types

  Electrical Distribution

  The intake and everything that shares it out - incomer, transformers, switchgear, standby generation, CHP, solar, storage and power factor correction. This is where a site's dependency chain starts.

• 11 types

  Water & Effluent

  Incoming water and everything that happens to it before it leaves: treatment, softening, reverse osmosis, boreholes, drainage and the effluent plant, which has its own regulator and its own bills.

• 7 types

  Utilities

  Shared site services that do not belong to another category - pumps, tanks and vessels, the gas intake, clean-in-place, fire pumps and bulk fuel storage.

• 15 types

  Controls & Automation

  PLCs, SCADA and HMI stations, building management, control panels, drive cabinets and industrial networks. What matters about a controller is rarely its rating - it is whether the program is backed up and whether the vendor still supports it.

• 5 types

  Lighting

  Internal, high bay, external and emergency lighting, with whatever controls them. The most commonly recommended retrofit, and the one most often already done.

• 16 types

  Sensors / Instrumentation

  Metering and measurement - temperature, pressure, flow, level, vibration, energy, water, gas and air. Everything else on this list is easier to judge when it is measured, and most of it is not.