They let me into a working factory and I want to build my own: where to start

November 2, 2026  ·  Indumor

Give me one afternoon inside a plant that runs, a few photos and a good memory, and I can build one just like it. We hear that often, usually from people who come back with two hundred photos and not a single measurement. Looking is not enough. It takes asking, measuring and writing down, which means the visit gets prepared like an inspection and not like a tour.

The situation is more common than it sounds. A cousin who makes the same product in another city, a friend who is retiring, a partner whose plant is already running and who lets you in so you can set up yours in another region. They open the door once, with luck twice. What follows is what to bring ready and what to bring back.

Before, during and on the way out

• Bring the questions on paper. Inside a running plant there is noise, people saying hello and plenty to distract you. Questions that are not written down do not get asked.
• Ask the owner about what is not on the machines. What they would change if they built it again, what broke more than once, which supplier let them down, which machine they would buy again and which they would not, what a normal shift produces and what a bad one does.
• Photograph nameplates, not panoramas. The plate on every machine with its model and power, the inside of the electrical panels with the door open, the air and water connections, the floor where it is broken, the extraction hoods, the spare-parts shelves. One photo of a nameplate is worth ten of the building.
• Film the machines working. Thirty seconds of each one with real material. Later, when someone has to explain what it does, the video answers what memory makes up.
• Measure the big things with a tape and the small ones with calipers. Bay width and height of the building, where the machines sit relative to the columns, aisle widths, the height of inlets and outlets. If you want to copy an entire machine, that is a separate job, with a teardown, and it gets agreed separately.
• Respect what they do not show you. If the owner does not want a recipe, a panel or a supplier photographed, it does not get photographed. That plant is their twenty years of work. Give something back, even if it is just the tidy survey you produced.
• Write it up that same night. Photos renamed, measurements on a hand sketch, the answers next to each machine. A week later, half of it is gone.

What you will not take home from any visit are the recipes and settings tuned over years, the people who know when a machine sounds different, and the mistakes the owner already paid for and you will pay again if you do not ask about them. Nor the suppliers who never fail, usually the best-kept secret of all. That is why the most valuable question of the day is what they would do differently. The answer tends to come without being asked twice.

What has to come out of the visit is a list you can get quotes on. The building with its dimensions, the machines with their nameplates, whatever consumption figures you managed to note, and everything between one machine and the next, which is almost always custom-made. With that list in hand, the budget for the structure and the equipment stops being a number pulled from the air.

If you want to go deeper into what to measure and record, continue with cloning a factory: what to survey, which has the full list and the four documents that come out of it. And once you have yours together, at Indumor we quote the building and everything that goes between the machines; industrial reverse engineering covers what we do when a piece of equipment has to be copied as well.

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