Factories that bought the whole line and never produced

November 2, 2026  ·  Indumor

Some factories bought the complete line and never made a single product.

The containers arrived, the machines were unloaded, someone lined them up inside the building and there they stayed. Months go by, then years, and the whole line ends up gathering dust with the packing plastic still on. We have seen it more than once, in industries that have nothing to do with each other. And it is almost never because the machine is bad.

Eight reasons a line never starts

1. Nobody owns the project. The owner closed the purchase, "someone" was going to handle the installation, and that someone had another job. A line gets built by one person who answers for it, with time and with a list.

2. The utilities were not there. The machine asks for 380 V, 90 kW and air at 7 bar. The plant had a 30 kW supply and a workshop compressor. Until the power is in, there is no start-up, no matter how level and freshly painted the machine is.

3. The building was not finished. With no floor, no roof or not enough height for the lift, the machines wait outside. And outside they rot.

4. The raw material is not the one from the test. At the factory of origin it was tested with dry, even material. Here it came in wet, with a different grain size, and the machine jams after half an hour.

5. The financing stopped. The last installment went somewhere else, and what was missing (conveyors, panels, intermediate hoppers) was never bought. What was left was a line with holes in it.

6. The supplier never came. The technician who was going to install it never traveled, or came for ten days and left with the line half done and the manual in a language nobody reads.

7. Nobody knows how to run it. Without training, an operator tries it for a while, something breaks, and from that day on the machine becomes untouchable.

8. The auxiliary equipment was missing. The compressor, the chiller, the dust collection, the scale. The catalog line ends right where the part you have to solve locally begins.

How it gets rescued, in four steps

1. Audit and inventory. Everything gets counted against the packing list, crate by crate, and sorted into what is sound, what got damaged and what never arrived. Without that list, everything else is guesswork.

2. A plan in stages. Utilities first, then the building, then the foundations and only at the end the machines, each with its date. Whatever the line of origin did not bring gets defined here, with dimensions.

3. Make what is missing. Structures, hoppers, walkways, supports, ductwork and panels get built in the shop while the civil works move ahead, and reach the plant when there is somewhere to put them.

4. Start one machine at a time. Each unit runs alone, empty and then with material, and only once it works does it get connected to the next one. Firing everything up at once and hoping for the best is the fastest way to break something that was fine.

If your case is not the whole line but a single machine that was installed and never ran right, read installed machine that never worked, which takes a different path. And if you want someone to walk your building with the list in hand, at Indumor we do that audit and the staged commissioning in Argentina.

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