How to read an automation quote

The robot is usually the smallest number on the page and the only one anybody looks at. Here is where the rest of the money actually is, and which paragraph decides whether you ever get to call the project finished.

Open any integrator quote and your eye goes straight to the arm, because it is the part you can picture. It is also frequently a quarter or less of the total, and it is the line item with the least uncertainty in it, since the robot costs what the manufacturer says it costs. The money and the risk live in everything around it.

A complete quote has more in it than most first time buyers expect. There is the robot and its controller. There is end of arm tooling, which on a hard job can approach or exceed the cost of the arm. There is the controls work, meaning the PLC integration, the safety devices and the logic that ties the cell into whatever it has to talk to. There is guarding and mechanical infrastructure, so fencing or light curtains, the robot base, any conveyor modification, the pedestal, the part presentation. There is electrical and pneumatic installation. There is engineering time, which is the actual labor of designing your cell. Then acceptance testing, installation, commissioning, training, documentation, and whatever spare parts and support arrangement follows. When a quote is dramatically cheaper than another, the difference is almost never a cheaper arm. It is scope that one of them left out.

So read for the omissions. The costs that surprise people later are consistent enough to list. Changeover tooling for the second part number, when the quote covered only the part you demonstrated with. Electrical work to the cell, which is often carved out as by others and lands on your local contractor. Floor preparation or foundation. The conveyor or feeder that presents parts, which is a separate project people assume came along for the ride. Network and ERP integration. Training beyond the day of commissioning. Spare parts, particularly the wear items on tooling that will fail first. And the cost of your own people during commissioning week, which is real and rarely planned for.

Now the paragraph that matters more than the price. Somewhere in the document there should be acceptance criteria, and if there are not, stop and ask for them before anything else. Acceptance criteria are the definition of done, and a project without them cannot be finished, only abandoned. Good criteria state a rate, a duration, a part set, and a quality standard. Something on the order of a specified number of parts per hour, sustained across a continuous run of a stated length, on a named list of part numbers, with a defined maximum for faults requiring operator intervention. Vague criteria are how projects end up in the state where the integrator considers the job complete and you consider it broken, and both of you are reading the same contract.

Tie payment to those criteria rather than to the calendar. A structure where a meaningful portion of the money is held until site acceptance is normal, and reputable integrators will agree to it because they intend to pass. Retention is not an insult. It is an alignment of interest, and it converts the final ten percent of the project from a favor into a deliverable.

Understand the two acceptance tests, because they are different events. Factory acceptance happens at the integrator's shop before the cell ships, ideally running your actual parts rather than sample blanks, which means you need to send real material and real variety including the ugly parts. Site acceptance happens on your floor after installation, with your operators, on your material flow. Ask how many parts will be run in each. A factory acceptance of fifty parts and a factory acceptance of a thousand parts are not the same test, and the difference shows up on your floor rather than theirs.

One last thing worth negotiating, and it is the item buyers most often leave on the table. Training is usually quoted thin, a day or two around commissioning, and it is the cheapest thing in the document to ask for more of. Ask for additional hours, ask for them to be scheduled a few weeks after startup rather than all during it, and get your named cell owner into the room for all of it. The week of commissioning is the best education anyone in your building will ever get about this cell, and most shops spend it doing their regular jobs and letting the integrator work alone.