A buyer who needs equipment for automotive-parts production usually sends one of two messages. The first is a list of machine names copied from another factory. The second is a photograph of a workstation, a part drawing, and one sentence: “three people do this now, we need half that number.” Neither message is enough on its own. Before a supplier can name an equipment series, they need to know what the line is making, how the part moves through it, and which failures the buyer can no longer afford to pay for.
The questions below are the ones our engineers ask at the start of a manufacturing automation project. If a supplier skips them and quotes a machine in a day, treat the quotation as an estimate of hardware, not of a working production line.
1. What is the part, and how stable is its design?
Send the part drawing, the material, the tolerance that actually matters, and the version history. A bracket whose mounting hole has moved twice in a year will move the design of a fixture, a vision station, and a feeder. We ask whether the drawing is frozen, whether changes are still expected, and how long the part will be produced. Short life parts justify simple stations; long-run automotive parts justify hard tooling, error-proofing, and documented change control.
We also ask what the tolerances mean in practice. A drawing written for a machined part may not be the standard an assembly line can hold with manual loading. Knowing which dimension is inspected by the customer and which one only has to look right lets us put measurement where it earns its cost.
2. Which process step is in pain today?
“We want automation” is not a scope. We ask the buyer to walk the station with us, on video if the visit is not possible, and name the operation: pressing, fastening, inserting, adhesive dispensing, labeling, loading, unloading, inspection, cleaning. Then we ask which one sets the pace of the line and which one creates the rework. In most automotive-parts plants the constraint is not the machine with the longest cycle, but the station where an operator hunts for a part, waits for a fixture to clear, or re-runs a manual check.
A single workstation is a valid project. Automating one step, then measuring, then moving to the next is usually cheaper and safer than rebuilding a whole line in one contract.
3. What is the required output, shift by shift?
We need parts per hour, not parts per day. A daily target hides the peak. Then we ask the number of shifts, the planned overtime, the changeover frequency, and whether the line runs one part number or several. A station sized for a single SKU behaves very differently from one that switches between a left-hand and right-hand bracket every two hours. Changeover is a design requirement, not an afterthought, and quick-change fixtures are decided on the drawing board.
We also ask whether the target is today's volume or the volume the customer plans to audit you against in two years. Equipment that cannot follow a raised takt time is bought twice.
4. How is quality judged, and who judges it?
Ask the supplier how they plan to prove a good part from a bad one. For automotive work this usually means dimension checks, function checks, presence checks, torque or press-force records, and in some cases vision inspection of appearance. A manual check has two costs: the labour and the disagreement between shifts about what counts as acceptable. We ask the buyer to describe an accepted part and a rejected one in words, because that description becomes the inspection recipe, the reject route, and the record the customer will ask to see.
Traceability is a separate question. If every serial number must carry its own press force and test result, the data model has to be designed with the PLC program, not bolted on after acceptance.
5. What are the boundary conditions of the floor?
A supplier who has not seen the floor cannot size a machine. We ask for the available footprint, door and lift dimensions, aisle width, floor loading, and where the machine will actually be unloaded. Then the utilities: voltage, available compressed air and its dryness, whether a vacuum or chilled-water circuit exists, and whether the process produces chips, oil mist, foam, or wash liquor that has to be collected. Cleaning or fluid-handling steps are part of the line, so a station that needs wash or cleaning equipment should be scoped together with it rather than added later.
Retrofit work also has an interruption budget. Tell the supplier how long a line may be stopped. A weekend changeover and a two-week shutdown produce different mechanical designs and different commissioning plans.
6. What does the buyer maintain, and with whom?
Ask who will keep the equipment running. A plant with a maintenance team and a PLC-literate engineer can accept a machine with open programs and local spare parts. A plant with one electrician and no programming support needs clearer alarms, documented recipes, consumable parts listed by model, and training that goes beyond a handover day. We ask which control platform the site standardizes on, because a machine that speaks a protocol the site cannot service becomes a spare machine.
Ask the supplier what they will hand over: electrical drawings, structure drawings, the program, the spare-parts list, the acceptance test record. A supplier who will not commit to deliverables in the contract is asking you to buy their memory.
7. How will both sides agree that the project is finished?
Put the acceptance criteria in writing before the order: the cycle time to be demonstrated, the yield or reject rate to be held, the run duration for the stability test, the safety requirements, and who signs the record. Factory acceptance and on-site acceptance are different events, and the difference is usually where a dispute begins. Ask the supplier which tests they will run before shipment and what they expect from your line during on-site commissioning, including the material and the operators they will need from you.
A supplier who helps you define these criteria before signing is usually confident. One who resists them is describing their risk, not yours.
8. What is the budget range and the schedule for the decision?
A range is enough. Without it a supplier designs to the top of what they guess you can pay. With it they can tell you which station is worth automating now and which one should wait for the next budget cycle. We ask for the date the equipment must be running, because component lead times and the length of the validation phase decide whether that date is achievable at all.
Ask the same question about prototypes. Many automotive-parts projects move faster through a prototype or single-function station, a measured result, and then a full station, than through a single large contract.
9. What is not on the drawing?
The questions that save the most money are about things the buyer already knows. Do operators wear gloves that make small parts hard to grip? Is the incoming part sometimes sticky from the previous process? Does the supplier of the raw part change packaging between lots? Are the shifts differently skilled? These details decide whether a feeder, a fixture, or a vision station works on the third day or fails in the first week. Tell the equipment supplier early.
If your process also needs custom tooling or a non-standard station built around an existing line, describe it in the customized solution request together with the drawing, the volume, and the deadline. Those three inputs are usually enough for an engineer to tell you what is feasible, what is expensive, and what should wait.
A useful test for any supplier: send them the part drawing, the takt time, and one paragraph about the station as it runs today. If their reply is a price, they are selling a machine. If their reply is a list of follow-up questions about your process, your quality records, and your maintenance team, they are proposing an equipment project — and that is the conversation worth continuing.
