By Tadas Šalkauskas, CEO, MachineryAssist
Ten years ago, almost every heavy machinery relocation was a drama.
A corrugator had to be moved. An FFG was purchased from another country. An RDC was heading to a new plant. Everyone understood the value of the equipment. Very few understood the complexity of moving it.
Delays appeared. Questions multiplied. Trucks waited. Installation teams stood idle. Production schedules slipped.
And every extra day cost money.
Over many years of work and experience, we understand a simple truth: machinery relocation should not be a drama.
What changed — and why it matters
During these years, MachineryAssist has handled nearly 5,000 truckloads of industrial equipment. Dozens of corrugators, FFGs, RDCs, and many other types of oversized, specialized machinery.
Every project taught us something new. Every challenge forced us to improve.
Today, we complete many projects in nearly half the time that was considered normal a decade ago. For a manufacturer running a corrugator at full capacity, every month of downtime can represent $300,000–$600,000 in lost production. Getting back online two weeks faster is not a logistics detail. It is a financial decision.
The case that changed how we think about equipment
A few years ago, we relocated a BOBST die-cutter from a plant in Austria to a facility in Belgium.
Standard job, on paper.
The machine weighed in sections that exceeded what our equipment at the time could lift in a single pick. We had to break it down further than necessary — adding two full days of dismantling, complicating the reassembly sequence, and extending the commissioning phase.
Projects like these pushed us to invest in portable high-capacity lifting equipment rated to 20 tonnes — four times the 5-tonne standard units. The difference in practice: large machine sections and complete sub-assemblies that previously required full disassembly can now be moved intact.
On every comparable relocation since, we have recovered 10 to 15 working days per project.
At a daily downtime cost of $15,000–$20,000 for a mid-sized corrugated plant, that is a difference of $150,000 to $300,000 — per project.
The problems nobody warns you about
Heavy machinery relocation is not just a logistics challenge. It is a minefield of invisible risks that hit from every direction — and usually hit hard.
Licensing. In several European countries, crane operators require local certification to work legally on-site. We have seen projects where a contractor arrived with a qualified crew — only to discover that their licences were not recognised in that jurisdiction. The result: work stopped, a certified local operator had to be sourced on short notice, and the customer paid three days of idle time across an eight-person installation team. Cost: roughly $40,000 in delays and emergency sourcing fees. This is entirely avoidable — if you know to check.
Opportunistic upgrades. A disassembled machine looks like an opportunity. Owners think: while it is in pieces, let us replace the worn parts, upgrade the drive system, add the sensors we always wanted. Sometimes that logic is sound. Very often it is not. We have seen upgrade decisions made mid-relocation that extended the project by four to six weeks, because the replacement components were not in stock, the modified machine required re-engineering of the installation footprint, or the new systems simply were not compatible with the existing line. The cost of one poorly timed upgrade can exceed the entire relocation budget.
The rule we follow: if an upgrade was not planned, budgeted, and sourced before the machine left its original location — it does not happen during transit.
What experience actually means
There is a saying that moving is like experiencing two fires.
We have spent the last decade learning how to make it feel like something far calmer — a well-planned journey with known checkpoints, documented risks, and people who have seen almost every failure mode before it happens.
Experience is not only knowing how to do something.
Experience is knowing what will go wrong before it does — and having already solved it.
If you are planning a machinery relocation, we are happy to walk through your specific project: the equipment, the route, the timeline, the risks. No obligation.
Because the best relocation is the one nobody remembers as a problem.
MachineryAssist specialises in the relocation of heavy industrial and corrugated packaging equipment across Europe and beyond.
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