Robotics demos are easy to love. They’re clean, controlled, and happen on your best day. Deployments are the opposite: messy floors, changing workflows, surprise edge cases, and a support phone that doesn’t stop ringing.
This is a practical rollout playbook I’ve used in some form across multiple deployments. It’s not theory. It’s the stuff that prevents “great pilot” from becoming “quietly cancelled program.”
Pilots lie (a little). Production tells the truth.
In a pilot, you’re usually running one site, one shift, with the “A-team” watching. Production is three shifts, changing staffing, new inventory, process changes, and a facility that has a thousand other priorities.
When you plan your rollout, assume the environment will drift. Your job is to make the system resilient to that drift—technically and operationally.
Define “done” in operational language
The fastest way to stall a deployment is vague acceptance criteria. “It works” is not a requirement. The question is: works for who, under what conditions, with what failure behavior?
- Uptime targets (and what counts as downtime)
- Throughput targets tied to the real workflow
- Safety expectations and incident handling
- Recovery time from common failures (network, sensor faults, blocked paths)
- Support SLAs and escalation paths
Site readiness checklist (the boring part that saves the project)
Most “robot problems” are actually site problems. Before you roll hardware in, align on readiness:
- Network coverage in every relevant zone (including the dead corners)
- Clear ownership of maps, zones, and change control
- Charging / staging locations that don’t break the workflow
- Safety signage, training plan, and shift coverage
- Downtime procedure: what operators do when automation is unavailable
Simulation is useful—but only if you close the loop
Sim helps you de-risk layout, traffic patterns, and capacity planning. But it only stays useful if you feed it with real data from commissioning and operations.
The pattern that works: simulate → deploy → measure → update assumptions → simulate again. Treat simulation as a living tool, not a one-time sales artifact.
Design your support model before you need it
A rollout fails when the system becomes a burden to operations. Support is not an afterthought. Decide upfront:
- Who is first-line support on each shift?
- What is the “triage playbook” for common issues?
- How do you capture logs/telemetry when the site is under pressure?
- When do you patch, and how do you roll back safely?
Scale by repeating a template, not by improvising
Your second site should be dramatically easier than the first. If it isn’t, you didn’t productize your rollout. Create a repeatable template: commissioning steps, training, monitoring dashboards, and sign-off criteria.
That’s the difference between “one great site” and a program that can scale globally.