Before any design work starts on a pharmaceutical expansion, someone has to go and look at the building. Not the drawings of it. Not the plan for what it should become. The building as it stands today, with its existing plant, its site boundaries, and everything underneath it.

That's the job Dominic Weston does. We sat down with him to talk through what a site assessment involves, and why so much of it happens before a single design decision gets made.

Let's start with the basics. What's the point of a site assessment?

"Most companies haven't mapped their true demand. We're pressure testing your current infrastructure against your five year plan. What stretches it? Where's the bottleneck?"

It sounds like a simple question, but Dom says most clients haven't sat down and worked out where their current setup will start to struggle. A five-year plan is one thing on paper. Finding out which part of the building will hit its limit first, and when, is another.

Why not just start from the drawings you already have?

"Building drawings tell one story. What we find on site often tells another. We're checking capacity, condition, and what can realistically integrate with new infrastructure."

Drawings show what was built, or what was meant to be built. They don't always show what's happened to a building since: the modifications, the wear, the small changes that never made it back onto a plan. Our Feasibility team check all of that against reality before anyone designs around it.

What kind of things get missed if you skip this step?

"Easements. Ground conditions. Supplier access. Space for temporary works. Existing building quirks. These things cascade into costs and timelines if you don't understand them early."

None of these are dramatic on their own. An easement here, a supplier access route there. But Dom's point is that they compound. Miss one early on, and it shows up later as a cost overrun or a delay, at a point in the project where it's far more expensive to fix.

Regulation must factor into this too, especially for pharmaceuticals. How does that work?

"GMP interpretation isn't universal. Water discharge, air handling, waste handling: what's required in your region shapes engineering decisions. We're getting this locked down before design."

This is one that's easy to assume is standardised and isn't. Good Manufacturing Practice requirements shift depending on where a facility sits, and those regional differences feed directly into engineering choices as something that needs to be settled before design work begins.

And below ground, how much does that matter for an expansion?

"You can't design structural systems until you understand what's below. Soil conditions, water table, load-bearing capacity, it all matters. Especially when you're expanding an existing facility."

Expanding onto or alongside an existing structure raises the stakes here. Whatever's already built has to interact with whatever gets added, and that interaction starts with what the ground itself can support.

So what does all of this add up to?

Pulled together, Dom's answers map onto five things our Feasibility team is testing before a pharmaceutical expansion moves anywhere near a design brief:

GMP compliance from day one. Your space against your five-year plan. Supply chains and equipment specs. The regulatory landscape for your region. And what's possible, given the reality of the site.

It's not a formality before the "real" work starts. In Dom's world, this is the real work. The part that determines whether everything that follows is built on solid ground, literally and otherwise.

Inuti is a global design and engineering firm delivering advanced facilities for science, with over 60 years of experience and 712,000+ sq ft delivered. We work with flavours & fragrances, life sciences, pharmaceuticals, agri-tech and technology companies at every stage of growth, across the UK and beyond.

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