Machinery and industrial moving
Rigging, not moving. What changes when the load is heavy enough that the building and the route become part of the engineering problem.
Once a load is heavy enough to need lifting gear, the job stops being a moving job and becomes a rigging job. The vocabulary change matters, because the competence, the insurance and the planning are all different.
What gets planned that would never come up on an office move
- Floor loading at both ends, including the route between the door and the final position, not just the final position itself.
- The lifting plan: equipment, rated capacities, lift points, and who has signed it off.
- Route survey covering door widths, ceiling heights, turning circles, and the load capacity of anything driven over.
- Disassembly scope, and whether the manufacturer requires a specific sequence or an authorised engineer.
- Foundations, anchoring and levelling at the destination, and who is responsible for them.
- Recommissioning and safety verification before the machine is used again.
- Permits and escorts for oversize or overweight road movements.
Insurance is the question to ask first
Rigging is a distinct insurance category. General moving liability will not respond to a dropped machine tool, and the value at risk is usually far higher than the fee for the work.
Ask for the certificate of insurance that specifically covers rigging, check the limit against the replacement value of the machine, and check whether it also covers damage to the building. A dropped load damages both.
Downtime is usually the real cost
On production equipment the moving fee is rarely the largest number in the project. Lost output while the machine is down normally is, and it is the number worth optimising the schedule against.
That makes it worth asking bidders how they would sequence the move to shorten downtime, rather than only what they would charge. The cheapest quote and the shortest outage are frequently different bidders, and the difference is quantifiable in your own production figures.