The compliance gap between a demo and a deployment
The distance from “it works on stage” to “it is legal on your floor”.
Service contracts: what a real SLA has to cover
Response times, spare parts and who owns the downtime.
A service contract is not a formality attached to the invoice — it is the document that decides who absorbs the cost the day the robot stops working.
An SLA is a risk transfer
Every SLA moves risk from one party to another, whether either side names it that way. A response-time clause, a spare-parts commitment, an uptime guarantee — each one answers the same question: whose budget takes the hit when the machine goes down.
Read backwards from that question and the document gets easier to negotiate. A vendor comfortable naming a response time in hours, not "as soon as possible", is a vendor who has already priced the risk into the contract rather than into a later renegotiation.
“An SLA nobody has ever invoked is not proof it is a good contract — it is proof nobody has tested it yet.”
Most disputes over a service contract trace back to a clause nobody pressed on before signing.
The clauses that matter
Response time only means something with a unit attached — hours on-site, not "priority support". Spare-parts coverage only means something with a location attached — held locally, not shipped from a factory on another continent. Uptime only means something with a measurement method agreed before the meter starts running.
The clauses that get skipped are rarely skipped by accident. They are the ones a vendor would rather leave vague, which is exactly why a buyer should ask for them in writing before the pilot, not during the first outage.
WHAT TO TAKE AWAY
Ask for a response time in hours, not a phrase like "priority support".
Spare-parts coverage only counts if the stock sits locally, not at a factory overseas.
Agree the uptime measurement method before the contract starts, not after a dispute.
A downtime clause with no name attached has not removed the risk — it has only delayed the argument.
A contract that reads well in a boardroom and a contract that holds up on a factory floor are not always the same document.
Who owns the downtime
Ownership of downtime has to be assigned somewhere — to the factory, the integrator, or the site operator — and a contract that leaves it unassigned has not removed the risk, only delayed the argument about it.
The safest test is practical: ask what happens when the robot stops mid-shift out of hours, and see whether the answer is a name and a number, or a shrug.
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
- 01Manufacturer service SLAs2026
- 02N.O.N. Humanoid vetting notesFactory audits · 2026
- 03Operator interviewsEurope · Q1 2026
- 04Site commissioning logs2025–2026
A QUESTION
One person answers — from the first email to the room.
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