Notes for owners · Channel and customer growth
Service contracts and upgrades after an automation installation
Every panel, robot cell and SCADA system you have commissioned is a future service contract or upgrade, and a register of each system and its age tells you what to offer and when.
The GullySales team · Updated 17 Oct 2026 · 6 min read
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A plant you automated years ago rings because the HMI has gone blank. The engineer who did the job has left, and nobody can find the programme backup. That plant is not a closed account. It is your next order, if you know what you installed there. So record every system you have commissioned, with its controller, its age and who holds the programme. Offer a service contract at handover, while the plant still trusts your team. Offer an upgrade when a part goes out of production or the line changes, not when you are short of work.
The customer list you already have
Integrators spend their selling time on new plants. Old ones become references. Yet the plant that runs your panel already knows your work, keeps your drawings in a cupboard and calls you first when something trips. Its maintenance budget will be spent on someone.
The trouble is that the knowledge lives in people. One engineer remembers the casting line; another has the test-bench programme on a laptop. When either leaves, the plant becomes a stranger, and the rival who answers its breakdown call that night may become its integrator.
The register: one row per system, not per customer
A plant with three of your systems gets three rows. Each row should hold what a breakdown call or an upgrade offer will need.
| Column | What to write | When you need it |
|---|---|---|
| Plant and line | Company, unit, and the name the plant uses for the line | Maintenance describes faults by that name |
| System | Panel, robot cell, vision station, SCADA, drive set | Decides which engineer goes |
| Controller and HMI | Make, model, firmware or software version | Tells you when a part leaves production |
| Handover | Date of commissioning and of warranty end | The day to offer the contract |
| Programme | Where the latest backup is, and who at the plant holds the passwords | The first question in any breakdown |
| Spares | Critical spares the plant holds, and the ones it does not | The opening line of a service offer |
| Contract | None, per call, annual contract, lapsed | Who to ring before the next shutdown |
| People | Maintenance head, electrical engineer, plant head, purchase | A contract and an upgrade are bought at different desks |
| Next step | What you will offer, and by when | Stops the row going stale |
Fill it from files you already hold: purchase orders, commissioning reports, drawings, warranty letters. The gaps need one call to each plant, and that call is itself a reason to be in touch.
What the age of a system tells you to offer
Read each row and pick one offer. Only one, or the plant hears a sales pitch.
- Between handover and the end of warranty: offer the service contract. The plant has just watched your team commission the line and is at its most willing.
- When the maker discontinues a controller, drive or HMI: write to the plant with the part number, the maker's notice and a migration plan that fits inside a shutdown. An upgrade with that reason behind it is easier for a plant head to approve.
- After the line itself changes, with a new pack size, a second shift or a new product: the old programme was written for the old line. Quote the change as a project of its own.
Timing matters as much as the offer. Many plants fix the next year's capital budget before the financial year starts; ask yours. Upgrade work then waits for a shutdown. A proposal that reaches the plant head in the week of the Diwali shutdown is too late. It belonged in the budget discussion months earlier.
Selling the contract on the day of handover
The best moment for a service contract is the day the plant signs the commissioning report, so send the warranty letter and the offer together. The offer lists visits before shutdowns, how a breakdown call is logged, backups held by both sides and a priced list of critical spares. It also says what is excluded, such as faults from the plant's power supply or programme changes made by its own team.
Hand over the source programme and every password, and keep your own dated copy. A locked controller may hold a plant for one breakdown, but it costs you the plant's trust afterwards. Renewal is a routine of its own, set out in our note on selling and renewing AMCs.
Imagine an integrator in Rajkot
Imagine an integrator in Rajkot that has automated casting, machining and pump assembly lines around Shapar and Metoda for years. The details are illustrative. Old customers ring only when something stops, and pay per visit.
One morning a pump maker's test bench stops dead. The HMI runs on an old industrial PC that has failed, and the engineer who wrote the programme left long ago with the only copy. Rebuilding the screens from printouts takes four days. The pump maker's maintenance head, embarrassed in front of the plant head, asks a Vadodara firm to quote for a new test bench.
That week the integrator starts the register. Two engineers go through old files, then phone every plant. Each programme they find is copied to the office server and to a drive handed to the plant. Rows with discontinued controllers are marked in red. The pump maker is offered a contract with a spare HMI kept on site and backups on both sides, and the test-bench migration is proposed for the Diwali shutdown. The contract is signed first, at a lower annual fee than the integrator hoped, and the Vadodara quote is not withdrawn until the shutdown. The upgrade follows once the plant head has seen a breakdown handled in hours instead of days.
When to leave a plant alone
A plant with its own strong automation team may want spares and a phone line for questions, nothing more. Offer that, priced per call, and stop there. Pushing a full contract on that team costs you the goodwill that brings the next project.
Do not sell an upgrade only because a controller is old. If the part is still made and the plant holds spares, tell the plant head to wait. That advice is remembered. And skip contracts for one-off small jobs, such as a single panel modification, where a visit costs more than the contract would earn.
Fill in the register from memory first
Open a sheet today. Fill in the plants you can name from memory, one row per system. Gaps? Dig out those files and ring those plants first, starting with any system whose warranty has just ended. The renewal call before each contract lapses is renewal management, and how plants find an integrator in the first place is on the industrial automation and robotics page. If you want your installed base turned into contract and upgrade offers, tell us what you need.
