Manufacturing & Industrial Plants
Factories and process buildings — the plant comes first, the building wraps around it.
Factory construction is a race between the builder and the machine supplier. The building itself is the familiar part — foundations, frame, big-span roof and envelope from the shared methods linked below — but its tolerances are set by the production line, not the architect: slabs engineered for machines, pits and gantries cast to the millimetre, and a column grid agreed with the process engineers before anyone draws an elevation.
The four guides in this sector cover industrial buildings and factories, process plant installation — where someone else's equipment arrives on a critical path you do not control — industrial MEP services sized for production loads, and controlled production environments where temperature, humidity and cleanliness are part of the structure's job.
What does Manufacturing & Industrial Plants cover?
Process guides in Manufacturing & Industrial Plants
- Factories & Production Buildings — Portal frames, high-bay halls and superflat floors built around a process that has not always finished being designed — industrial buildings where the steel, the cranes and the pits all answer to the production line.
- Process Plant & Production Line Installation — Machines off the low-loader and onto their bases — grouted, levelled and aligned to hundredths of a millimetre, hooked up to every service, then proven cold before anything gets hot.
- Industrial Services & Utilities — The arteries of the factory — compressed air ring mains, process water and steam, dust and fume extraction, HV/LV distribution for serious loads — built as production equipment, not building services with a bigger budget.
- Controlled Production Environments — Factories built to be washed, chilled and audited — hygiene-zoned construction with coved joints and seamless floors, temperature and humidity control, and the clean/dirty segregation that the certifiers come to inspect.
Shared methods used in Manufacturing & Industrial Plants
- Site Access & Enabling Works
- Earthworks & Excavation
- Piling & Deep Foundations
- Concrete Frame Construction
- Steel Frame Construction
- Floor Slabs & Screeds
- Roofing
- Façade & Cladding
- MEP First Fix
- MEP Second Fix & Commissioning
- Testing, Handover & Snagging
Part of the Industrial & Specialist Facilities group.