What the trial request itself has to carry
A cleaning trial on factory machinery usually fails before anyone switches on a machine. The supplier is asked to remove "grease" from an equipment line, and the answer arrives as a brochure instead of a plan. That is rarely a supplier problem. It is an information problem. The supplier can quote a machine from a catalogue; only your site data tells them which surface, which residue, which utilities and which stop window the trial has to work inside.
Before you invite a supplier of factory machinery degreasing equipment on site, send the six packages below. A trial run on a machine that already has these answers takes an afternoon. Without them it takes a week and proves nothing.
One: a written no-spray list signed by the maintenance owner
The single most valuable document is not a product datasheet. It is a list of components on and around the target machine that must not be wetted or sprayed, signed by the person who owns the asset. In practice that list covers control cabinets, drives and inverters, linear scales and encoders, cable chains and connectors, wipers and seal lips, spindle tapers, and bearings and guideways that carry lubricant on purpose. Note the last item carefully: some grease on a machine is not dirt. Removing it creates a second problem that looks like a cleaning failure.
Send this list to the supplier with lockout and tagout rules attached, and state whether the trial happens on a cold machine. A hot surface changes what any heat-based method does to the residue, and it changes the safety brief.
Two: a residue sample that says what the grease actually is
"Grease" is a category, not a description. Photograph the actual deposit at close range and describe it in four states: fresh and soft, gummy and tacky, baked on and hard, or mixed with abrasive fines. Note the source, too. Way oil, spindle lubricant, hydraulic leakage, chain oil and a mixed oil-and-dust paste respond differently, and an abrasive-loaded deposit will scratch whatever you wipe.
Attach the material safety data sheet of the lubricant or process fluid that leaves the deposit. That sheet answers questions about flash point, additives and how the residue behaves under heat far better than a guess on site. It also feeds your own waste handling decision later.
Three: surfaces split into groups, not one machine treated as one job
Split the asset before the trial. Painted panels and guarding behave differently from the working envelope, which behaves differently from the electrical enclosure and from the floor around the machine. Send the supplier a simple table: surface group, material, access opening, whether the area drains, and how far the operator has to reach.
Add photographs from the positions the operator will actually stand in. A picture taken by a supplier at a demonstration never shows your hose routing, your guard, or your column in the way.
Four: utility facts from the exact position, not from the plant drawing
A trial that cannot be powered where the machine sits is not a trial. Confirm for the trial position: which supply circuit is available and what it can deliver, how the cable will be routed without crossing a walkway, where the water refill point is, and how far the operator walks per refill. Say what your tap water looks like, including hardness, because scale inside the supplier's own equipment is a real trial cost that nobody logs.
Then state the drainage answer honestly. Where does the run off go, is there an oil separator or an interceptor in that path, and can the floor be dried before the shift returns? If the answer is no, the low water methods in industrial steam cleaning equipment are worth testing precisely because they reduce runoff volume. Ask the supplier to state their own temperature, pressure and mode figures at the nozzle rather than quoting them at you, and record what they claim.
Five: access, stop window and who is allowed to be in the area
Give the supplier the physical envelope: door widths, aisle width, floor load, any step or ramp, ceiling height, and whether the unit has to travel between bays. A machine that cannot reach the position never gets evaluated.
Then fix the window. State the hours the line is available, who must be present from maintenance and production, and what the exclusion rule is for other staff around a wet, hot work area. Write down the personal protective equipment and the slip control you already require, so the trial does not become a separate safety conversation.
Six: your own baseline and the four numbers you will compare
Choose the worst area you normally clean, not a flattering one, and clean it first with your current method. Time it, count the refills, weigh or estimate the water and consumables, and photograph the result from a marked position at a marked angle. That is your baseline; without it, a trial is just a demonstration.
Then hold both runs to the same four measures: elapsed time to get the asset back into production, water and wastewater handled, refill trips, and whether the surface passed a cleanliness gate defined before the trial started. Add one cost the supplier will not raise for you: follow-up rework. If a cleaning run causes a fault reset, a re-squared axis, a re-lubrication, or a stopped machine, that is a cleaning cost and it belongs in the comparison.
After the run: what to ask the supplier to send back
Ask for the parameters actually used, not the maximum parameters the catalogue advertises: distance held, traverse speed, mode selected, number of passes, and the surfaces each setting was used on. Ask which of your no-spray items constrained the method, and what they would change on the second attempt.
Ask one procurement question that most buyers forget: does the standard production configuration cover your surfaces and your utilities, or does the answer require a build-to-order machine? If a build is needed, send your surface table, your utility facts and your residue sample to the customized cleaning equipment team instead of asking a distributor to interpret them.
Turn the trial into one controlled sheet
Close the trial by writing what worked into a single one-page work instruction: surface group, method, distance, speed, passes, allowed and forbidden areas, water and drainage notes, and the acceptance gate. Log one line per machine per cleaning, with the person and the date. That log is your audit evidence, and it is also what stops a good result from disappearing when the operator who ran the trial moves to another line.
If you want a second opinion on a residue sample or a surface you cannot reach, contact PowerDe with the surface table, the residue photos and the utility facts for that position; those three inputs are what make the reply specific rather than generic.
