Name the machines, one row each, before you name a method
Most enquiries for plant cleaning open with a method. Someone decides that steam is the answer, or that a foam and rinse cycle would do, and the enquiry asks for that. By the time a supplier replies, the question has already been answered by a person who had no access to the machines. Starting with the inventory instead costs an afternoon and changes the rest of the process.
An inventory that is worth quoting from is a table, one row per machine, and it is built by walking the line with a clipboard rather than by pulling asset records. The columns that matter are not the asset number and the purchase date. They are what the machine is made of where the grease sits; whether the surface is painted, bare, anodised, plated or a decal; whether the greased area is open, behind a panel, or behind a panel that takes a shift to remove; how the machine is fed with power and water and where its drains run; and what sits within reach of the spray.
Expect three or four clusters in that table rather than a dozen different problems. Grease on a ways-and-guides assembly behaves nothing like grease on a painted guard, and neither behaves like the same grease on a finned heat exchanger. The clusters, not the machines, are what a supplier can price. A list of thirty asset numbers with one method attached to all of them produces a quotation that has priced an assumption.
This is the least glamorous information on the list and the item that conditions everything after it. Photographs and a written description matter more than the asset register, because the register tells a supplier what you own and nothing about what is on it.
Describe the deposit, not just the mess
"Grease" is a colour and a texture, not a specification. Two bays in the same plant can carry deposits with different origins, different ages and different responses to heat. Describe each deposit the way you would describe it to a person standing in front of it: where it came from, whether it is a film, a soft build-up, a hard skin, or a mixture that has picked up abrasive fines. Say how old the oldest reachable sample is. Say whether it is still being renewed by a drip, a leak, or overflow at the point of use.
That last sentence deserves emphasis, because it is the item most often left out and the one that most often wastes the cleaning. A machine cleaned under a deposit that is still leaking simply re-soils; the trial then reads as a failure of the equipment rather than a failure of the diagnosis. If you cannot point at the source, or state that you have looked and not found one, the cleaning scope has not been defined and no quotation for it is meaningful.
If the exact chemistry of the deposit is genuinely unknown, write that too. Do not guess it in the enquiry. Suppliers who price against a guess will price against the wrong deposit and will be surprised at the trial, and by then the surprise is paid for by you. Where you can send a sample or a photograph of a scraper-off, do it, and keep the photograph with the enquiry rather than in an email thread.
- Deposit origin: process oil, way oil, hydraulic film, grease purge, a mix with swarf or dust
- Condition: fresh film, soft build-up, cured skin, deposit holding abrasive particles
- Age of the oldest reachable deposit, and whether any part was cleaned before
- Active source: named leak, drip, overflow, or a written statement that none was found
- Photographs from fixed positions, numbered against the machine rows
Say what the plan can disrupt, and who signs for it
Ask production for the window before the enquiry goes out, not after the quotations arrive. Equipment selection follows the window far more often than buyers admit. If a machine can be stopped overnight, a wide range of approaches is available and the trial can be simple. If it runs whenever the shift runs, the only workable approach is one that can be broken into pieces, on surfaces that can be isolated, with the machine handed back between pieces.
Put that constraint in your own words. Which machines may be stopped, on which days, and who authorises the stop. Whether cleaning may run alongside neighbouring production. Whether the surroundings may get wet, or whether adjacent cabinets, machines, stored material and services must stay dry throughout. Record the answer per cluster, because those answers are also why two suppliers propose different equipment for the same deposit.
Walk the route with a tape and a notebook
The site data that decides whether quoted equipment can physically be used is measured, not looked up. Measure where the machine would stand and how it gets there. A quotation built on a floor plan routinely fails on the doorway, the aisle, the ramp, or the corner between the yard and the bay, and the machine in the brochure has handles, castors and a turning radius that the drawing does not show. The path needs a width at its narrowest point, a height at its lowest, and a note on the surface underfoot.
At the working position, record what is actually available: which supply is at that point and what it is protected by, where the connection would be made, how far the machine must stand from the position, and where the run-off would go. Do not assume a drain is usable because it exists. Whether water may enter a particular drain is a decision someone in your organisation makes, and it should be made before the trial rather than during it.
For every position, ask the same three things: can the machine get there, can it be supplied there, and can what it produces be dealt with there. A supplier who is given those three answers will tell you within a line or two whether they have done this kind of job. A supplier who is not given them will quote the machine they stock.
Put the exclusions on the front page, in writing
Buyers describe what they want cleaned. They rarely write what must not be touched, and the machine they buy then gets pointed at a nameplate, a bearing seal, a graduation scale, an electrical enclosure or a sealed bearing, because nobody said otherwise. Put an exclusion block at the front of the enquiry, machine by machine: what is off limits, what may be touched only behind shielding, what may be touched only on a written instruction from a named person.
Ask each bidder to mark the exclusions rather than comment on them, and to say plainly if they intend to deviate. A bidder who silently plans to clean a guarded area has now told you they will do it, and the conversation that follows is worth more than any paragraph in their proposal.
Ask the same question about the surroundings. A machine whose spray reaches an adjacent cabinet, or whose steam reaches a stored material, has been mis-specified even if it cleans your deposit perfectly. Whether equipment may be used at all in a given area is governed by rules your plant already has; those rules are not published on a supplier's page, and a supplier cannot see them.
Set the conditions the machine must leave behind, not just the finish
Two quotations for the same job can both be honest and disagree completely, because one supplier's clean is a surface free of visible grease and the other's is a surface that has been returned to a state they will sign for. Decide your own definition first, in observations a person can make: no visible film on the horizontal face; no soft build-up in the seam; the label still legible; the guard's coating unlifted; no residue pooling where it will run into a gap.
Then write what must still work afterwards, and put it in the enquiry as a condition rather than a hope. Ways still slide. Seals still seal. Graduations can still be read. Enclosures have not been filled. The machine is dry and cool enough to be handed back. A clean that costs you a nameplate, a scale or a bearing is not a clean, and if the condition was never written, the supplier is entitled to disagree with you afterwards.
Keep the items you can count separate from the items you judge. Time in the bay, water used, where the run-off went, how long shielding took: those are counted. Finish on a painted guard, finish in a corner, damage found on hand-back: those are judged, and a judged item needs a name against it. A quotation you can compare is one where both suppliers were told how the answer would be scored.
Compare suppliers on the questions you asked
Send one identical enquiry to every bidder and score the answers against the same columns. The set that separates manufacturers from resellers is short. Which page of which document states the operating figures for the machine you are being quoted, and is it the machine being delivered or the range it belongs to. Who connects utilities at your plant and who pays for that work. What protections the machine has, what each one senses, what the machine does when it trips, and who resets it. Which parts are consumables, how often they are replaced, and which warranty terms depend on those replacements. What the supplier needs from you to confirm the machine suits your job.
Read the answers for what they refuse to commit to. A reply that states capability for your deposit but stays vague about your surfaces is telling you something. A reply that prices the machine but leaves the run-off, the shielding and the hand-back to "site arrangements" has moved that work, and that time, onto you without pricing it. If nothing on your plant matches a standard configuration, that is not a disqualifier: it is the point at which customized steam cleaning equipment becomes the honest route, and a supplier who says so early is usually the one worth the second conversation.
Run one bounded trial with its stop conditions already written
Whatever the paperwork says, the suitability of equipment for grease-covered factory machinery settles only under your own conditions: your panels, your deposit, your operators, and the exclusions carried across from the enquiry into the trial. Design that trial before you commit, starting from one named machine in the cluster that best represents the worst case.
Declare the stop conditions in advance and in writing. If the coating lifts on the test patch. If run-off cannot be contained. If the sequence cannot be broken into pieces on a machine that cannot be stopped. Then declare what evidence the trial must produce, because a trial that nobody recorded is not evidence: the sequence with the time each stage took, what was shielded and what shielding cost, water used, the run-off route, the finish against each surface class, and the one place you expected to fail and whether it did. A supplier's own document about steam cleaning equipment testing does not substitute for that record, however credible the supplier: it describes what their equipment does under conditions they chose, while your record describes what it did on your ways, your painted guards and your seams. A machine-tool or kitchen duty stated in marketing copy is likewise not evidence for your cluster; where the published material describes other duties, the honest reading is that your job is a question to be answered on a trial, not a fact to be assumed.
The short version
The gap between a passed trial and a working practice is where most cleaning programmes quietly die. While the record is fresh, convert it into one written instruction per cluster: what the deposit is, which surfaces it applies to, the exclusions, the sequence, the judged items and who signs them, the counted items, the run-off route, and the condition on which the machine is handed back. One standard per deposit family, not one document for the whole plant; the instruction that works on a painted guard will not work on bare ways, and a standard that averages the two is the one people ignore.
Before the enquiry goes out, you should be holding: a machine table with surface, enclosure and reachability columns; a deposit description per cluster, with the active source named or ruled out, plus photographs; the shutdown and co-running constraints in your own words; a measured route and utility record for each working position; a written exclusion block; a definition of clean and a list of what must still work afterwards; one identical set of supplier questions; and a trial with stop conditions and required evidence written in advance. If any of those is missing, the quotations you receive will still be comparable to each other, and none of them will be comparable to your job. Collecting those items costs a week of walking the plant with a notebook. Skipping them costs the machine you bought, the trial you had to repeat, and the cleaning programme that never became a practice.
