Three quotes, one is 40% cheaper. Now what?

Stage 6 of eight. This article is one step in the production line buyer’s roadmap — the full sequence from defining the product to the first year of operation.

Who this is for

You have two or three quotations. The specification sheets describe roughly the same line at roughly the same output. One is dramatically cheaper. Nobody in your business can tell you why, and the suppliers all sound confident.

This is the position almost every first-time buyer ends up in, and it is genuinely difficult — not because the information is secret, but because nothing on a specification sheet is designed to answer it. The way out is not to become an equipment engineer. It is to ask a small number of questions whose answers cannot be faked cheaply, and to know what a low price legitimately buys.

One piece of advice that circulates among experienced importers is worth starting with, because it sets the right suspicion level without tipping into paranoia: “prices that are way lower than everyone else. If it looks too good to be true, it usually is.” True, but incomplete. A cheaper line is usually not a fraud. It is a set of decisions, and the decisions have addresses.

The seven places the money goes

1. Contact material grade and thickness

This is the most common way a quotation is made cheaper without changing how the machine looks in a photograph. For food and beverage, contact surfaces are normally 304 stainless, with 316 where chlorides are present — salt, brine, some cleaning chemistries, many effluent streams. The phrase to distrust is “food grade stainless” with no number after it; that is not a specification.

Two things to get in writing, per surface: the grade, and the plate or sheet thickness. Thickness is where the quieter saving lives — a thinner hopper wall or frame member costs less, weighs less to ship, and flexes in service in ways that show up as misalignment two years later. Ask for both to be acceptance items, verifiable at the factory test.

2. The bought-in components — and the question everyone asks wrong

Motors, gearboxes, bearings, pneumatic cylinders and valves, the PLC, HMI and variable-speed drives are all bought in, on every line, at every price point. The difference between quotations is which ones.

The usual advice is to insist on recognisable brands. That is half right and it costs you money. The question that matters is not whether the brand is famous but whether you can buy the part in your own country next year, and how fast. A motor from a brand with a real distributor in Accra, Lagos, Nairobi or Lusaka is worth more to you than a nominally superior brand with no local channel, because the part you cannot obtain is the part that stops the line. The same logic applies to the PLC: a controller your local automation shop has never touched is a controller only the supplier can service.

What to ask for: the bill of materials with real manufacturer part numbers, not descriptions. Then take two or three wear items from it — a bearing, a seal kit, a contactor — and price them locally before you sign. Fifteen minutes of that exercise tells you more about your next five years than any brochure. Our guide to which spares to hold works through the same list from the other end.

3. The control panel — the most informative thing you can photograph

If you only look at one thing, look inside the electrical panel. It is the part of the machine built last, under the most schedule pressure, by the people whose discipline determines everything you cannot inspect.

What good looks like: wires ferruled and numbered at both ends, terminals labelled to match the drawing, cables run in ducting rather than bundled, separation between power and signal, a door interlock on the main isolator, components mounted on DIN rail with room to work, and a legible schematic in the document pocket. What bad looks like is immediately obvious to anyone, engineer or not: a nest of unlabelled wire in the same colour.

A panel that is disciplined tells you the factory has a process. A panel that is chaotic tells you that the mechanical work you cannot see was done by the same organisation. This is also the single easiest thing to verify remotely, which is why it belongs at the start of your evaluation rather than at the factory acceptance test.

4. Safety guarding and interlocks

Guarding is the first place a cheap line saves, because it is visible on the price and invisible on the specification. What to check: fixed guards where nobody needs access and interlocked guards where they do; emergency stops that break the control circuit rather than merely signalling the PLC; guarding on every rotating shaft, nip point and blade; and a documented risk assessment for the line as installed, not for each machine separately.

Two reasons this matters beyond the obvious one. First, it is the only saving on this list that can injure somebody. Second, your national occupational safety regime applies to the line on your floor regardless of what the supplier shipped, so guarding omitted at the factory becomes your cost and your liability at commissioning.

5. The documentation pack

Ask what documents arrive with the line, in what language, and in what format. A complete pack is a general-arrangement drawing, electrical schematics, a process and instrumentation diagram where relevant, the bill of materials with part numbers, operation and maintenance manuals, the spare parts list with recommended holdings, and the calibration and test records from the factory test.

A bill of materials with real part numbers is worth more than a warranty. A warranty depends on a relationship surviving; a part number lets any competent fitter, anywhere, buy the component from anyone. This is the item most often reduced to a folder of photographs and a translated leaflet, and the reduction is nearly free for the supplier, which is exactly why it has to be a named deliverable in the contract. The related question of whether the controls can be maintained at all is covered in maintainable controls on an imported line.

6. Is the control system open, or are you renting it?

Ask three questions and write the answers into the contract: can our maintenance team connect to the PLC with standard software; is the program password-protected, and if so do we receive the password; and do we receive the program source and the HMI project files.

A locked controller is not a technical decision, it is a commercial one. It means every future change — a new product size, a modified recipe, a retimed sequence — goes through the supplier at whatever price applies then, from whatever time zone they are in. On a line you expect to own for ten years in a market where the product mix will change, that is one of the more expensive things you can agree to without noticing.

7. What is actually inside the scope

The last one is the least technical and the most common. Two quotations for “a complete line” routinely differ by:

• the conveyors and accumulation between the machines — frequently excluded, and frequently what decides real output;
• the electrical panel and cabling between machines, versus a panel per machine;
• installation and commissioning labour, and who pays travel and accommodation;
• operator and maintenance training, and how many days of it;
• the wear-part kit for the first year;
• tooling or change parts for the second and third product size;
• utilities connection from your supply point to the machines.

Why accumulation matters more than it sounds is a separate subject, worked through in why a new line misses its rated output.

Eight questions, three suppliers, one ranking

Send all three suppliers the same list. You are not only collecting answers — you are measuring how specifically each one can answer, which is a proxy for how well they understand the line they are offering.

The ranking usually writes itself by question four. And a caution worth carrying into the whole exercise, from a buyer who had been through it: “neither tells you whether the factory has the systems to hold your standard when nobody is watching.” Answers on paper establish a shortlist; they do not replace a factory audit or a witnessed test. Our supplier audit checklist covers what the visit has to establish.

Five photographs, asked for early

Before travel, before deposits, before a factory test is even scheduled. They cost a good supplier ten minutes and they are hard to fake:

1. Inside the main control panel, door open, taken straight on.
2. A weld on a product-contact seam, close up. Ground and polished, or ground roughly and left.
3. The nameplate of the main drive motor. This tells you the brand, the rating and whether the BOM was honest.
4. The machine running with product of the kind you make — not an empty-machine demonstration.
5. The documentation pack laid out for a previous customer, with the confidential parts covered.

A supplier who sends all five quickly has nothing to manage. A supplier who sends three and explains the other two has a reason worth hearing. A supplier who sends none has answered the question.

What a low price legitimately buys

It would be dishonest to leave the impression that cheaper always means worse. Several real and defensible reasons produce a lower number, and a first-time buyer should be able to tell them apart from omissions:

• A standard model rather than a custom build. Often the better purchase — standard machines have production history, available parts and fewer surprises.
• A lower level of automation for the same throughput, which may suit your labour economics rather than insult them.
• A simpler finish where cosmetics do not affect the process.
• A smaller organisation with lower overhead, which can be excellent and is a genuine risk only on support reach.

The distinction to hold in mind is between cheaper because different and cheaper because omitted. The seven headings above are how you tell which one you are looking at. And the comparison that sits underneath all of this — where Chinese and European equipment genuinely differ and where the difference is folklore — is set out in Chinese vs European production lines.

Normalise before you compare

Finally, the mechanical step that most buyers skip. Write your own scope list — every machine, every conveyor, the panel, installation, commissioning, training, the wear-part kit, change parts, freight and documentation — and require each supplier to price your list, line by line, marking exclusions. Then compare.

A quotation that cannot be broken down into your list is not a quotation; it is a number. In our experience the exercise moves the cheapest bid several places up the price order often enough that it is worth doing before any other evaluation. What the total project costs once everything outside the machine price is counted is worked through in what a production line really costs.

How we work on this part

Where a buyer already has quotations in hand, we read them against these seven headings and return a normalised comparison: what each supplier is actually offering, what each has excluded, and what the real difference between the numbers is. Where we are specifying the line ourselves, the material grades, the bill of materials with part numbers, the panel standard, the documentation pack and the controller access terms are written into the purchase contract before it is signed, and verified at the factory test in China before money moves. How we audit and manage suppliers describes the mechanism.

Frequently asked questions

Material grades and panel conventions described here are the ordinary expectations for food, beverage and general processing equipment; your sector regulator or insurer may require more. Quotes from buyers are reproduced verbatim from public discussion collected during 2026 and anonymised.