The three lines missing from your automation quote
Shipping, nests, and installation. On a $140,000 cell they can carry $20,000 of exposure, and they routinely reach the financing partner unpriced.
Here is a quote structure from a real case-packing cell, lightly anonymised:
- Six-axis cobot, mid-payload class: $42,900
- End-of-arm tooling (tool changer and two vacuum grippers): $28,925
- Barcode reader: $2,500
- Operator buttons and indicator lights: $2,500
- Pneumatics: $2,500
- PLC and HMI cabinet: $16,250
- Labour (assembly, wiring, packaging): $7,500
- Engineering (design, programming, test): $36,925
- Total: $140,000
It looks complete. It is not. That quote explicitly excluded three things: shipping, the product and case nests, and installation and startup.
Those exclusions are not dishonest. An integrator cannot price installation before site conditions are verified, and cannot price nests before final product geometry is frozen. Excluding them is correct practice. The failure is what happens next.
The headline number travels
$140,000 is what gets repeated in the internal business case. It is what goes to the financing partner. It is what the operations lead reports upward. Three exclusions carrying somewhere between $15,000 and $25,000 of real cost (eleven to eighteen percent of the cell) quietly do not travel with it.
The consequences arrive later and land badly. The customer discovers the project costs more than they approved, at precisely the moment they have already committed emotionally. The financing partner discovers the asset value they underwrote was incomplete, which is a credibility problem that outlives the deal. And the integrator, who did nothing wrong, absorbs the blame.
There is a second, subtler version of the same failure: the exclusion that arrives disguised as a discount. In the cell above, the integrator offered that if the system could pick two or more items at a time, the second gripper and the tool changer might not be needed. That reads as a price concession. It is not; it is a specification change with throughput and changeover consequences, and booking it as a discount without re-examining the spec is how cells end up underperforming their business case.
No quote enters the capital track with unresolved exclusions.
The operating rule is simple to state and requires software to enforce. Every exclusion is either priced, formally assigned to a named party with a cost estimate, or explicitly accepted as customer scope in writing. The exclusion register travels attached to the quote, and the number that reaches the financing partner is the exclusion-adjusted number.
Scope-for-price trades route back through specification review, not through the pricing conversation.
None of this is difficult. It is just impossible to do reliably when the system of record is an email thread and the person tracking it is also running the deal.