The compliance gap between a demo and a deployment
The distance from “it works on stage” to “it is legal on your floor”.
Commissioning: the week that sets the ROI
The unglamorous week that decides whether the numbers ever land.
The sales case is built before the robot arrives. The ROI case is built in the first week after.
Why week one is the whole bet
A commissioning week is where a mapped route, a proposed shift pattern and a staffing plan meet an actual floor for the first time. Whatever assumptions the quote was built on get tested immediately, not months later.
A site that skips a proper commissioning window tends to discover its exceptions live, during production, which is the most expensive place to find them.
“The quote is a hypothesis. Commissioning week is where you find out if the floor agrees.”
Commissioning is not installation with extra paperwork — it is where the operating model gets proven.
What commissioning actually covers
Route or task mapping against the real floor, staff briefing on the stop procedure and exception handling, and a monitored run of a full shift cycle before the robot is left unsupervised.
Each of these produces a record — a commissioning log — that becomes the reference point for every dispute about performance later in the contract.
WHAT TO TAKE AWAY
A commissioning log is the reference point for every performance dispute that follows.
Staff briefing on the stop procedure belongs in week one, not week eight.
Test a full shift cycle under supervision before leaving the robot unattended.
A skipped commissioning window moves exception-finding into live production, where it costs the most.
A clean handover at the end of commissioning is what protects the payback case for the rest of the contract.
The handover that protects the payback
The handover should name who owns the machine day to day, what counts as an exception versus a fault, and which numbers the site will actually track against the original business case.
Without that handover, the ROI conversation six months in becomes a dispute about memory rather than a review of a shared, dated record.
EDITORIAL RULE
Sourced or silent. Every figure on this page carries an attributed, dated source. Where we could not source a number, we left it out rather than estimate it.
SOURCES
- 01Site commissioning logs2025–2026
- 02Operator interviewsEurope & the Gulf · Q1 2026
- 03Manufacturer service SLAs2026
- 04N.O.N. Humanoid vetting notesFactory audits · 2026
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