Andritz Filter Press: A 6-Step Procurement Checklist from a Buyer Who Learned the Hard Way

Back in 2020 I took over purchasing for a mining services company in Chile. We’re about 180 people across two sites, and I handle the ordering for just about everything: office supplies, PPE, chemicals, reagents, and occasionally capital equipment. Annual spend is around US$4 million—maybe 3.8 or 4.2 depending on the year—across more than 30 vendors. I report to both operations and finance, which means I have to keep costs down and make sure nothing stops production. Those two goals collide when you buy equipment.

The reason I’m sharing this is a mistake I made in 2021. I signed the purchase order for a filter press that was $38,000 cheaper than an Andritz quote. It looked great in the budget. Then in March 2023 the press failed because of a hydraulic problem. The supplier’s after-sales support was, for lack of a better term, basically non-existent. Downtime and repairs ate up more than the $38,000 we thought we’d saved. That experience pushed me to learn how to buy equipment properly, and in June 2023 we ordered an Andritz filter press as a replacement.

If you’re a buyer, a procurement coordinator, or an office administrator tasked with buying an Andritz filter press—or any industrial filter press—this article is for you. It’s not a technical guide. Process engineers don’t need it. It’s a six-step checklist I run through every time, in the order I’d do them.

Step 1: Lock down the process parameters before you talk to vendors

A filter press is designed around the slurry it will handle: solids content, particle size distribution, pH, temperature, feed rate, cycles per shift, and target cake moisture. If you don’t give the supplier those numbers, any quote you receive is a guess.

For the 2021 purchase, I told the supplier “about 20 tons per hour.” That was it. No particle size distribution, no solids percentage, no target moisture. The press they quoted matched those three words and little else. The Andritz engineers asked the right questions from the beginning. I didn’t even know the questions existed. (Should mention: they didn’t make me feel stupid. They just asked for the data and built their proposal on something real.)

Ask your own process engineer to write the parameters down on one page. Send that page to every vendor. It also protects you later—if your internal specs change after the PO is placed, you have the original document to refer back to.

Step 2: Confirm the legal entity you’re actually buying from

In Chile, Andritz operates through Andritz Chile Ltda. That matters more than it sounds. What appears on the quote, the invoice, and the contract determines who handles import duties, taxes, warranty claims, and after-sales service.

I ask every vendor in writing: “Please confirm the legal entity that will issue the invoice and sign the contract.” For Andritz, we wanted Andritz Chile Ltda. on the documents, with their local RUT—not an affiliate on the other side of the world. This sounds like admin trivia until something goes wrong and you realize your contract is with a legal entity that has no local presence and no incentive to help you.

Confirming Andritz Chile Ltda. early also helped with delivery planning. The local office coordinated the customs side and arranged the service engineer for commissioning. Nothing mysterious—but you can’t get any of that if you’re only emailing a salesperson in another country.

Step 3: Demand an itemized scope of supply

If a vendor sends a one-line quote that says “filter press: $XXX,XXX,” don’t buy it. There is no such thing as a filter press that arrives on a truck and runs by itself. Ask for a breakdown: press frame and plate pack, hydraulic power unit, filter cloths, feed pump, valves and instrumentation, control panel and PLC integration, freight and customs under a defined Incoterm, installation supervision, commissioning, and operator training.

What you assume is included is often quoted as an extra. The 2021 quote excluded the feed pump completely—we assumed it was included. That’s on me. When I finally put the bids side by side, the $38,000 price gap had shrunk significantly. The machine that looked so cheap on paper wasn’t quite so cheap anymore.

Step 4: Ask about wearing parts before comparing prices

Here’s the step most first-time buyers overlook. A filter press’s purchase price is only one part of its cost. Filter cloths, membrane plates, gaskets, and seals wear out and need replacement. If you don’t know what a full set of filter cloths costs, or how long they last in your specific application, you’re comparing machines blind.

For the Andritz filter press, I asked the quote to include prices for a full set of cloths plus the normal wearing parts. I also asked whether those parts are stocked in Chile or have to come from overseas. A part sitting in a warehouse in Europe does you no good when the press has stopped and the production line is waiting. (Note to self: every vendor says “we have global supply chains.” Ask which parts are actually in-country.)

In the 2021 purchase, I hadn’t asked any of this. When the hydraulic manifold failed, we had to wait for parts—and the clock on our lost production was ticking. That is the kind of mistake that makes a buyer look bad to the VP.

Step 5: Get service response commitments in writing

A vendor that promises “excellent after-sales support” in a sales presentation is easy to find. You need specifics: Where is the closest service engineer? How quickly can they reach your site? What is the response time for a critical failure? What does a service visit cost? And all of that should be written into the contract.

With our Andritz purchase, the contract included the service response timeframe. The commissioning engineer stayed almost a week and trained our operators—that alone was worth more than most of the paperwork. If I remember correctly, the commitment was response within 48 hours for a critical breakdown. Don’t quote me on that as a standard; it’s what we negotiated in our agreement.

Ask for the name and contact of the local service engineer. If the vendor hesitates, that hesitation is useful information.

Step 6: Build a total cost of ownership comparison

When you compare bids, include a line for every cost you’ll see over the first three years: purchase price, freight and insurance, import taxes, installation, electrical connection, commissioning, operator training, spare parts, filter cloth replacement, consumables, and expected service visits. If you can estimate the cost of production downtime, add that as a risk factor too.

I’m not saying the most expensive option is always the right one. There are cases where a smaller or local supplier makes sense, especially if they give you the same level of detail and the total cost calculation is honest. What I’m saying is this: the quote with the smallest number at the top is not automatically the best purchase. The $38,000 we saved in 2021 disappeared quickly when the press failed. The lowest first price turned out to be the most expensive decision.

Three mistakes that still catch buyers out

The first is starting too late. Filter presses are not off-the-shelf items. Manufacturing slots need to be reserved, and shipping can take weeks. Ask about lead times before you finalize your project schedule, not after.

The second is skipping operator training. A filter press is not a vending machine. It has cycle parameters, safety interlocks, and maintenance routines. If your operators don’t know how to run it properly, it will fail—and then the vendor gets blamed for something training would have prevented.

The third is ignoring warranty conditions. Ask what is covered, what is excluded, and how to file a claim before you pay a deposit. That conversation is uncomfortable when the equipment is still being negotiated. It’s much more uncomfortable after an unexpected breakdown.

Even after completing all six steps, I second-guessed myself after we signed the Andritz PO in 2023. Did I ask the right questions? What if shipping was delayed? I didn’t relax until the commissioning report came back in early 2024—cake moisture at target, operators trained, no urgent calls from maintenance. For a purchasing person, that counts as success. The Andritz filter press has been running steadily since then.

That’s the checklist. Not exciting, but it beats the feeling of standing next to a broken press and explaining to finance why you bought the “cheaper” option.

(I still keep the March 2023 failure report in my folder. It’s a good reminder.)