Three vendors. One week. All on the same site. The orchestration discipline.
The pattern is becoming a sector-wide shift. Hardware OEMs increasingly position themselves as platform vendors, with someone else taking on the install layer. The installation crew was historically a small but tight loop in the OEM’s delivery chain. Pulling it out forces the integrator to assemble a multi-vendor crew per site, against tight crew tolerances.
That “someone else” is where most multi-vendor timelines collapse. When an integration spans three different OEMs, the assumption is that the integrator orchestrates. In practice, integrators do not have crews of their own at scale. The gap between the WMS / WCS handshake and the boots on the floor is where things go wrong.
The orchestration discipline goes like this. One coordinator per site, owning the daily standup across all vendors. One QC log, indexed against vendor and asset. One escalation path, regardless of which vendor caused which defect. One Gantt embedded inside the integrator’s steering pack. Same standards, audit-ready dossier on hand-over.
The next bottleneck in automation is not hardware quality, and not the high bar each OEM holds. It is finding a commissioning package that holds up when the OEM is no longer on site. We assemble that package, on demand, for integrators running multi-vendor programmes across the EU.