Thursday, July 18, 2019

How Pilot Plants Save Money

By Susan Hayes


Many individuals and small businesses have struggled to move their ideas from singular creation to mass production. The time, financial investment, and energy are often overwhelming. Building pilot plants can relive all of these problems. Being smaller, they take less money to build and reduced time from start to finish. There are many benefits in using this option when you want to go from small-scale to large-scale production.

Moving a product off the bench is difficult. Creating one is hard enough. Setting up a system to create enough for proper testing in order to get products ready for the market is even harder. Having a smaller facility that mimics a larger one gives you the ability to produce on a larger scale and do more testing at once. This saves time when time is a factor. This gives you the ability to move from the bench to a real manufacturing system.

Testing the product part needs to be done. When it takes a significant amount of time to create one at a time, the testing will be slowed and interrupted. Having the ability to create many and test them all at the same time can move things forward quickly. There is a point that you need to know that the product works under various conditions. Testing one scenario at a time would take too long.

Scaling up for production is tested through the pilot phase. The cost of a huge production facility is not always a good investment when you're still working out the kinks in how a product will be produced. Having a smaller and less expensive facility allows you to test and modify the production setup before investing in the larger production line. When so much is at stake, it is important to get the assembly line and testing systems set up to know that your end product will be exactly what you want. Without this intermediate step, the modifications to a full-scale production line will be extremely costly.

Saving money is always good. The pilot plant phase costs much less than the larger systems. The equipment, employees, and other factors are much smaller in scale and keep the investment smaller in turn. Using the middle step reduces the amount of money needed to get up and running. Once the money is coming in from sales, it is much easier to secure capital for the larger facilities.

Remote destinations may need a modular facility. In some cases, the resources for testing or creating a product are not easily accessible. Being able to build a modular plant allows the company a chance to get the facilities close to the point of origin and reduce shipping or transport costs. The plant can be built on site and even moved at a later date.

Smaller systems take less time to build. Usually, when a small business wants to ramp up production, they spend a lot of money getting the new lines setup. If the new facility takes a long time to get ready, the money continually flows out instead of in. Saving time by getting the system's set up quickly allows the business to start making money much faster. This then allows the products to get to market faster.

There is a middle step that can happen between creation or very small scale and larger production environments. This middle ground allows companies that want to scale-up save money and time so they can get back to earning money quickly. There is also less need to find additional finance through banks and large scale investors when the costs are much more reasonable.




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