The Fabtech blog

• The process. What you will make, in what dosage form, and at about what scale. For example: tablets, capsules, liquids, sterile injectables, API or biologics. Your answer changes almost every later step of the project.
• The containment requirement. If the material is potent, tell us its OEB band. OEB (occupational exposure band) is a grade that shows how little of a material a worker can safely be exposed to. This one figure decides if you need a booth, an isolator or a contained suite. Their costs differ by an order of magnitude, which means about ten times.
• The market. Tell us which regulator will inspect the facility. Also tell us the electrical supply at the site: 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The format of the documents and the specification of the equipment both depend on this.
• The state of the site. Greenfield (an empty plot), brownfield (a site used before), an extension, or a retrofit into a running plant. A retrofit means new work inside a plant that is still in production. It is a different engineering problem from an empty plot, and usually a harder one.
• Your timeline. Include any regulatory or commercial date the project has to meet.

For a single piece of equipment rather than a facility, tell us four things: the machine, the material, the throughput and the destination market. Throughput is how much material the machine must process in a set time.