Virtual Tours for Factories and Manufacturers: Marketing, Recruitment and Safety Without the Site Visit

Factories are difficult places to show people. They are loud, they are busy, they have safety rules that make a casual visit a half-day of inductions and PPE, and the people you most want to impress, whether customers, candidates or investors, are often on another continent. A virtual tour opens the doors without stopping the line. Here is how manufacturers use them, drawn from the industrial tours we have produced since 2008.

Four jobs a factory tour does

1. Winning business

A buyer choosing a supplier wants to see capacity, cleanliness, quality control and modern equipment. A tour puts the shop floor in the sales deck and on the website, with hotspots for each process, capacity figures and certifications. Airbus used its tour to show a new wing integration centre to engineers worldwide; Barco in Belgium and the MTC additive manufacturing workshop did the same for customers and partners.

2. Recruitment

Engineering and production roles are hard to fill, and candidates picture factories as they were forty years ago. Cox Powertrain uses its tour to show a modern outboard engine plant to prospective staff before interview. Linking the tour from job adverts costs nothing and answers the "what is it like there?" question before the candidate decides whether to apply.

3. Induction and training

A tour with hotspots holding safety procedures, PPE zones, emergency routes and short video demonstrations gives new starters and contractors a site induction before they arrive. Tata Steel delivered its induction tour in VR headsets. Because the tour lives on 360 Studio, the health and safety team updates it when procedures change, and it can be password protected. More on training and onboarding tours.

4. Audits and stakeholder visits

Customers' quality teams, insurers and group head office all need to see the site. A dated 360 capture is a walkable record they can review remotely, with certificates and inspection reports in the hotspots. DP World Southampton and London Gateway used tours to show port operations to stakeholders who could not be on site.

Confidentiality and safety on the shoot

We work to your permit-to-work and PPE rules, shoot around shifts or during planned downtime where machinery must be static, and blur or mask anything sensitive (proprietary equipment, drawings, whiteboards, number plates) before the tour is published. Tours can be restricted to your intranet or password protected. A typical single-site factory is captured in half a day; large plants over a day or two, with a drone 360 of the whole site as the opening scene where airspace allows.

Which format?

For a large, complex site a bespoke 360 tour nearly always suits best: a curated set of scenes along the production flow, with hotspots explaining each step, rather than a scan of every square metre. Matterport suits smaller units and anywhere a measurable floor plan or BIM file is useful for planning a fit-out. Google Street View is rarely appropriate for a factory beyond the reception.

Cost and next step

Factory tours start from £350 for a small unit, rising with the number of scenes, with no travel charges anywhere in mainland UK. Our factory and industrial virtual tours page has more examples and answers to common questions, or send us a few lines about your site for a clear price.