Turnkey Automation Systems

Motionwell Automation builds turnkey automation systems in Singapore, meaning one contract covering the concept, the mechanical and electrical design, the software, the build, the acceptance testing, the installation and the documentation for a complete automation line. Delivered work at that scale includes a 12-station rotary syringe assembly machine built in stainless steel for ISO Class 7/8 operation on a 15 second cycle, with every press-fit station recording its full force-displacement curve against the part serial number; a battery module dismantling line where two ABB IRB 6700-200/2.60 robots at 200 kg payload and 2.6 m reach handle packs carrying 400 V and above; and a warehouse programme where eight laser-guided SIASUN AGVs rated at 1,500 kg each took over the transport routes between a storage and retrieval system, the receiving docks and the shipping staging area. Machines are designed, assembled and tested at our Woodlands Link facility, and the company has delivered more than 150 special purpose machines since 2014 under ISO 9001:2015 and bizSAFE Level 3.

The honest headline, before you read further: what a turnkey contract sells is not a discount and not a shorter contact list. It is the transfer of integration risk from your engineering team to ours. Everything else on this page follows from that, including the cases where the transfer is not worth making.

What turnkey means as a delivery model, phase by phase, is set out in our explanation of what turnkey automation includes, and this page does not repeat it. What follows is the capability: where the boundary of a single-supplier scope actually falls, the document that decides whether the project works, how a multi-station line is staged and installed, what stays yours whatever the contract says, and when buying a line this way is the wrong purchase. If you already have a process, a rate and a layout, skip ahead and talk to an engineer.

What Does a Turnkey Contract Actually Transfer?

One thing, and it is worth naming precisely, because a buyer and a supplier who believe different things were bought will find out at the worst possible moment.

Each piece of a line can be procured separately. Arms, conveyors, cameras, drives, panels and standard packaging machines are all catalogue items with datasheets. What has no catalogue entry is the assurance that those pieces will hold a sustained rate on your parts, in your building, with your operators, and recover sensibly when one of them faults. That assurance is integration risk, and a turnkey contract is the instrument that moves it from your side of the table to ours.

Four risks move with it. The cycle time measured on your actual parts rather than gate to gate with a dummy load. The handshake between every pair of stations, including what each does when the other stops. The safety functions that span more than one piece of equipment, since a stop category means nothing unless somebody owns both ends of it. And the record the line produces, which is a design decision taken at concept and an expensive retrofit at any point afterwards.

Transferring risk is not free, and the price is not mainly a line on the quotation. It shows up in three places.

The scope has to be complete before the price can be firm. Whoever carries a risk prices what they do not yet know about it, so a requirement written loosely is priced as a wide one. The work that shortens that is yours and it happens before the quotation, which is what our guide to writing an automation URS is for.

Change stops being a conversation and becomes a change order. Under a split scope you can re-brief one vendor quietly. Under a single scope, a change to one station is a change to the contract, because the party that guaranteed the whole has to re-check the whole.

You give up shopping subsystem by subsystem. The party accountable for the result chooses the components that produce it. You can still name a platform standard, and you should, because the right controller is frequently the one your technicians already know.

Where Does the Single-Supplier Boundary Actually Sit?

Not where the word suggests. Almost no production line is genuinely single-supplier once you count the utilities and the equipment already on your floor, and a supplier who claims otherwise is describing a sales position rather than a line.

Start with what we buy rather than build. We do not manufacture robot arms, cameras, drives, load cells, flow meters or piston pumps, and there is a family of settled packaging machines we integrate rather than design: carton erectors, case sealers, shrink tunnels, stretch wrappers, can seamers, high-speed rotary roll-fed labellers and induction sealing heads. Those are mature designs made in quantity, and specifying one is the right answer rather than a gap in capability. Turnkey describes who is accountable for the result, not who welded every frame in it.

Then the equipment you already own, which is where the boundary becomes real. On the QA laboratory programme, re-ordered in four consecutive years by a global medical device manufacturer, the automation drives the customer’s own universal testing machines directly for zero-reset, speed setting and test start; the instruments were theirs and the bidirectional link across that boundary was ours. We have also integrated tooling onto customer-supplied collaborative robot cells rather than insisting on our own arm. Each of those is a boundary with a signature on it.

Then another vendor inside the same project. On the warehouse programme our scope was the vehicle fleet, the conveyor interfaces, the fleet software and the warehouse management integration, while the racking and the stacker cranes came from the storage vendor. The crane side runs on a Siemens S7-1500 with Profinet communication to the fleet management server, and pallets are handed conveyor to conveyor rather than on fork tines. Two suppliers, one line, and one link between them that had to be agreed rather than assumed.

One legal boundary belongs in this list because it is settled by scope rather than by engineering. Where a turnkey line reaches into a machine you already run, the work can cross the line the European Commission describes as existing machinery modified to such an extent that it becomes de facto new machinery, set out on its machinery page. Below that line you keep an existing machine with a change on it. Above it, somebody is placing new machinery on the market and carries the conformity work that follows. Where the line sits is a judgement made per project rather than a number, and it has to be settled before the scope is fixed. The full version of that decision is on our retrofit and modernisation page.

What Is on the Interface List, and Who Signs It?

The interface list is the document that decides whether a turnkey project works, and it is not the specification, the layout or the schedule. It is a numbered register of every place two things meet, each row carrying one named owner and one test that proves the row is finished.

A single-supplier contract does not delete interfaces. It moves most of them inside one company, where a disagreement between two engineers costs a meeting instead of a change order, and that internalisation is a real part of what you are paying for. What it cannot do is delete the rows that cross out of the scope, and those are the ones that surface on your floor during commissioning.

Two habits make the list work rather than decorate the project file. Give every row a person’s name rather than a company’s, because a company cannot be asked a question on a Tuesday afternoon. And date each row when it is agreed, so a change to an interface is visible as a change rather than as a memory. How to make each of those rows testable in the first place is on the URS page and is not repeated here.

What Does Single Point of Accountability Actually Buy?

One owner for the number, which is the thing being purchased and the thing most easily given away by accident.

The number is sustained rate on your parts, measured at acceptance against a stated counting rule. Under a split scope that number belongs to nobody: each supplier can demonstrate their own equipment working correctly and still leave you with a line that does not make rate, because rate is a property of the whole and every party owns a part. Under a turnkey scope one party has to stand behind it, and cannot resolve a shortfall by pointing at somebody else’s equipment.

Three things dissolve that, and all three are done with good intentions. Free-issuing equipment into the scope without a performance statement attached to it. Keeping one station outside the contract because you already have a good supplier for it. And keeping a signal, usually a legacy one, because your own team wrote that logic years ago and understands it.

None of the three is forbidden, and a split scope is a normal thing to buy. Each just has to be recorded as a change of owner on the interface list at the time it is agreed, rather than discovered at acceptance when the rate is short and the argument is expensive.

How Is a Multi-Station Line Staged, Tested and Installed?

In an order chosen so that as little as possible happens on your floor, because floor time is time your line is not producing, and that hour is yours rather than ours.

Stations are built and proved individually before they are linked. A station running against simulated inputs gives an unambiguous fault: the mechanism, the tooling or the sequence is wrong, and there is nowhere else for the problem to hide. Once four stations are coupled, a dropped part at station three can be a gripper, a fixture, a timing assumption at station two or a conveyor that stopped somewhere else, and every hour of that ambiguity is paid for at four stations rather than one.

The line is then linked and run as one machine at Woodlands Link, which is where a buyer sees it. Design, fabrication, assembly and testing happen there with an in-house design team of eight, which is why a Singapore buyer attends the factory acceptance test in an afternoon rather than flying to it. Bring the people who will run it. What they find at that test is cheap to change while the line is still standing on our floor.

Shipping splits the machine again. A line arrives through your doors and around your corners in the sections it was designed to ship in, which is a design constraint rather than a logistics detail, and section joints have to land where re-alignment is quick rather than where the drawing was convenient.

Installation is then scheduled into the windows the plant actually has. Rigging, power, network connection and safeguarding do not happen mid-shift, so they go into shutdowns and weekends, and on our laboratory automation work the delivered system ran in parallel with the manual workflow until each station was accepted. Whether that parallel route is available at all is a site question rather than a machine question: floor space beside the running line, a feed that can be diverted, utilities reaching the new position, and enough people to run two configurations at once. The version of that trade for an existing machine is on our retrofit versus replace page.

Lead time runs 16 to 24 weeks from concept approval to factory acceptance testing on a standard build, and 24 to 32 weeks where GMP or cleanroom validation applies. Read those as calendar time rather than downtime: almost all of it happens in our building while yours keeps producing.

What Do You Still Own, Whatever the Contract Says?

Four things, and no wording moves any of them. This is not a disclaimer, it is a list of the items a buyer can quietly assume are covered and then find sitting on the critical path.

Utilities, past the machine’s connection points. A turnkey scope terminates at the machine. The delivered precision filling and sealing platform runs on a 220 or 380 V AC supply; on the cleanroom test equipment, air preparation units at each valve bank regulate to 0.4 to 0.6 MPa depending on the test force required; the 5-axis shot peening machine carries its own dust collection box and ducting, which the building has to accept somewhere; the battery dismantling line runs local exhaust ventilation hoods with HEPA-filtered extraction rated at 2,000 cubic metres per hour and holds the cell under slight negative pressure relative to the surrounding facility. Every one of those is a demand on your building. Write them as numbers early, because changing a building is a project of its own, running on somebody else’s schedule.

The supply of product and consumables. Parts representative of what actually runs, including the bad days, and the specification of anything the machine applies rather than makes. The closure, the liner, the media and the adhesive come from your supplier with their own windows, and the machine is built to hold a window rather than to invent one.

People, from handover onwards. A custom line assumes somebody on site reads schematics, holds spares and can follow a sequence. Machines here go out with mechanical drawings, electrical schematics, PLC program documentation, operator manuals, maintenance schedules and spare parts lists precisely so that team can work without calling us for every adjustment. Where no such team exists and none is planned, that is worth saying out loud before the line is designed rather than in year two.

The decision to stop. Only you can stop your own line, accept the machine, or decide that a rate shortfall is worth living with for a quarter. Singapore does not require CE marking, but the Workplace Safety and Health Act places duties on the occupier as well as on anyone supplying machinery for use at work, and residual risk is accepted by the party that operates the machine. A supplier can hand you evidence. It cannot hold your duty.

Why Does Acceptance Belong in Stages Rather Than One Event?

Because a single event has to prove things that cannot all be proved in the same place, and whatever is deferred to the end is being fixed in the place where fixing it is hardest.

Each stage answers a question the previous one could not reach, and each has a category of failure it is blind to. Reading the right-hand column is the useful part.

Two consequences follow. The first production week is a stage whether or not anybody named it, and having an engineer still on the floor through it is the difference between a fix and a support ticket. And in regulated production the qualification protocols are written against the same evidence rather than instead of it, which is why engineering commissioning runs first and generates the data that qualification then uses, a sequence set out on our computer system validation page.

When Is Turnkey the Wrong Purchase?

We sell whole lines, so read this as the argument against our own scope.

Your engineering team is strong and integration is the capability you want to keep. This is the strongest reason on this list. A plant with its own controls engineers, its own platform standard and a habit of building cells is buying equipment to keep a skill alive as well as to make product, and handing the integration to a supplier removes exactly the part worth keeping. Buy the stations, the tooling and the design work, and keep the interfaces. That is a scope we quote, and it is not a lesser project.

The problem is one station, not a line. A single station filling one gap in a line you already run is usually the cheapest place to start, and quoting a line when a station would do is a way of turning a small problem into a capital project. Which shape your enquiry actually has is worked through on our custom automation solutions page.

A proven standard machine covers the process. Where a catalogue machine made in quantity does the job at a lower price than anything we would build, the useful answer is to say so. The thresholds that close that option, and the ones that do not, are on our custom machine versus standard equipment page.

The requirement is not stable yet. A product design still moving, or a process nobody has proved by hand, gives a turnkey contract nothing to guarantee. The line will be built to whatever was frozen, precisely and expensively.

No window exists for a whole-line cutover. Where the plant can release days rather than weeks, a single tie-in is not the cheaper option, it is an option that is not available, and the answer is a phased line with acceptance station by station.

The scope is mostly other people’s equipment. When most of the value sits in machines you already own or have already ordered, a single-supplier wrapper adds a commercial layer over work that is mainly interface work. Buy the interface work directly.

Two exclusions while we are being direct, and they apply to any scope we quote. We do not build production welding cells. We are not a notified body and we do not issue CE certificates; we deliver the guarding, the safety functions and the evidence trail that support conformity, as described on our machine safety and CE marking page.

What Should You Settle Before Signing?

Seven questions, in the order they actually bite. The first that gives a hard answer usually decides how the scope should be drawn.

1. What is the sustained rate, and how will it be counted? A rate with no counting rule and no run length is not a requirement, it is an aspiration that will be argued about while the line stands there.
2. Which equipment in this line already exists or is already ordered? Every item on that list is an interface rather than a supply, and each one changes the design and not only the price.
3. Can the process be broken at a buffer? If it can, phased delivery and station-by-station acceptance are available. If it cannot, the whole line arrives at once and the window has to carry it.
4. What does the building actually provide? Power capacity, air, extraction, drainage, floor loading, clear height and the access route the sections arrive through.
5. How many hours can the line stop, and when? Shutdowns and weekends, stated as hours rather than as goodwill, because the installation programme is built from them.
6. Who on your side owns each interface row? Named people, particularly for the safety boundary and the data path, since the data path usually belongs to a department that is not in the room.
7. Who runs and maintains it in year two? If the answer is nobody yet, that changes the platform choice, the documentation depth and the training scope.

Where two rows apply, the enquiry usually contains two projects, and separating them is cheaper than writing one contract that covers both. The framework for scoring builders against each other, including us, is in our guide to choosing a system integrator.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can a turnkey line be delivered and paid for one station at a time?

Often, and it is worth asking for where the process allows it. The condition is that the stations have a natural break in them: a buffer, a rack or a tray where product can wait, so an accepted station can run into a manual step while the next one is still being built. Where the line is continuously coupled and every station depends on the one before it, phasing buys you a longer project rather than an earlier benefit. Tell us at enquiry which part of the process hurts most today, because that usually decides which station is worth building first.

What happens if our product changes after the design is frozen?

It becomes a change order, and how expensive it is depends entirely on when it lands. Acceptance criteria are written against named part numbers with stated dimensions and tolerances, so a geometry change moves the tooling, the nests and sometimes the station count with it. Concept approval is the cheapest place to change your mind; once detail engineering has started, the same change costs weeks rather than hours, and after fabrication it costs parts. A product still moving is a reason to delay a design freeze rather than a reason to hide it, because the machine will be built to whatever was on the drawing.

Does the turnkey scope include connecting the line to our IT systems?

It can, and it is the interface with a second owner inside your own company rather than in ours. Delivered examples: pallet movements tracked from pickup to delivery into a logistics operator's SAP EWM without manual scanning, a lightweight warehouse management system written natively in PLC logic managing 70 sample positions across 7 racks, and test results named under a controlled convention and uploaded to network storage. What has to be settled early is which values leave the line, in what format, to which system, and who on your side approves the network path, because that person is rarely in the room at concept review.