ASRS commissioning: why SAT pass does not mean production-ready.
The SAT script is a designed artefact. It exercises the system against pre-agreed pass criteria, with the integrator’s witness present, in a controlled time window. The system is calibrated, the operators are coached, the facility is at half load. The result is a binary pass that releases milestone payment.
Production-ready is messier. Peak hours, partial-shift fatigue, mixed SKU profiles, rejects, exception handling, recovery from soft faults, network jitter on the OT layer. None of these are exercised in a typical SAT. They are exercised in real operations, days or weeks after the integrator has left site.
The gap between SAT pass and production-ready is where customer dissatisfaction lives. The integrator delivered against contract, the customer is not getting the throughput they sold to their stakeholders. Both parties are right, the contract just did not specify the right test.
Our commissioning practice closes this gap with two extras: a peak-soak script that exercises the line at design plus 20% for 72 hours, and a four-week ramp coverage SLA where MERIXA crew remains on site for triage. The cost is small versus the alternative, which is the customer’s ops team triaging defects on day fifteen with no one on site to resolve them.
Field perspective: the integrators who book ramp coverage as part of the install package get fewer escalations in month two. The ones who treat SAT pass as the finish line get a lot of them. Same hardware, same SAT script, different post-launch experience.