Guides
Step-by-step playbooks for the automation buying journey.
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The guides section turns the principles from our cost and comparison work into a repeatable buying process. Automation projects rarely fail because the robot was wrong; they fail because the buying process was — a vague scope, an apples-to-oranges set of quotes, and no baseline to measure the result against. These playbooks walk through the steps that prevent that, from writing a request for quote that forces integrators to price the same job, to defining acceptance criteria before anyone installs hardware.
Each guide is written to be used at the desk rather than admired, with checklists and templates you can copy into your own process. The emphasis throughout is on making vendors compete on a level, fully specified basis, because that is where a buyer's leverage actually lives. Where a guide leans on a cost figure or a comparison, it links straight to the page that derives it, so the numbers you plan around are the same numbers we have itemized and sourced elsewhere.
In this section
- How to Write an RFQ for Automation: A Buyer's TemplateA section-by-section RFQ template for automation: current state, parts, cycle time and OEE targets, FAT/SAT buyoff, spares, timeline, and commercial terms.