PRECISION MACHINING
A defect caught at factory acceptance, not on the floor
$41K
AVOIDED REWORK
4 days
FIX AT INTEGRATOR
1st
SITE ACCEPTANCE PASS
200
CYCLES AT RATE PROVEN
Challenge
A precision CNC job shop with a two-person engineering group wanted lights-out machine tending across four mills. Unlike most deals in this category the customer was sophisticated: they had drawings, they had a controls engineer, and they wanted a formal requirements specification and a lease structure rather than a subscription.
Approach
The same pipeline ran at a different parameterization: a full user requirement specification was produced, light I/O integration questions applied, and the capital track was structured as a lease against verified asset value. Because the customer could answer technical questions directly, question tiering was raised rather than simplified. Factory acceptance was run as a gated milestone at the integrator's facility, requiring video evidence of 200 consecutive cycles at target rate before shipment was authorized.
Outcome
- Factory acceptance surfaced a gripper repeatability drift on small-diameter blanks at cycle 140, corrected at the integrator's facility over four days
- The same defect discovered on site would have carried an estimated $41K in travel, downtime, and re-commissioning
- Site acceptance passed on the first attempt
- Lease closed against acceptance evidence rather than a projected specification
“We have been through installs where the first anyone learns of a problem is when it stops the line. This one was boring, and boring is what I wanted.”
Director of Manufacturing Engineering