Installation & Commissioning

What you can do yourself

For a bench or floor-standing machine: unpack, position, level, connect power, connect air where required, load the consumable and run a test pack. The operating instructions cover each step and the settings that matter.

Levelling is worth doing properly rather than approximately. A strapping machine that is not level will feed strap unevenly and the fault will look like a tension problem for weeks before anyone checks the feet.

Run the first packs slowly and with the machine's own consumable settings before you change anything. It gives you a known-good baseline to go back to.

When an engineer is worth calling

Some jobs genuinely want somebody who has done it before, and we would rather say so than sell a visit that is not needed:

• A machine going into an existing line, where conveyor heights, timing and interlocks have to be matched to what is already there.
• Multiple machines commissioned together, where the sequence matters and each one affects the next.
• A machine your team has not run before and which will be operated by several shifts — the training is worth more than the installation.
• Anywhere the plant requires a commissioning record signed by the supplier for its own quality or insurance system.

What a commissioning visit covers

Siting and levelling, connection check, a run with your carton and your consumable rather than a demonstration pack, settings recorded so the machine can be returned to a known state, and operator training on the bench.

The training is the part buyers under-value and later say was the most useful. An operator who understands why the seal peels will fix it in a minute; one who has only been shown which button to press will call you.

Who attends, and for which machines

For the machines we design, assemble and run-test at our own works in Faridabad, the engineer is ours.

For the Fulcrum Infratech catalogue models, installation and service are carried out by Fulcrum Infratech Pvt. Ltd. — the same company, the same works.

For the lines we buy in — agriculture, and the office, safety and bags ranges — there is no commissioning visit, because those are supplied ready to use. We say so rather than letting you expect one.

Before the engineer arrives

A visit that spends its first four hours waiting for an electrician is a wasted visit for both of us. Have the power point terminated and tested, air run to the bench, the machine unpacked and in its final position, and the consumable you actually use on site — not a sample.

Have the operators who will run it available. Training the maintenance fitter and hoping it reaches the operators does not work.

The first week

A machine that runs correctly on day one can still drift by day seven, and the reason is almost always the same: settings changed by somebody trying to fix a symptom.

Write down the settings the machine was commissioned on and keep them at the bench. When something changes, that sheet is what you return to, and it turns a two-hour investigation into a two-minute one.

Run the machine on your real work rather than on a test pack for the first few days, and have somebody watch it who is allowed to stop it. The things that go wrong in the first week are usually about how the machine meets the bench — carton presentation, operator reach, where the finished pack goes — rather than about the machine itself.

Handing over between shifts

The most common cause of a machine performing differently on different shifts is that only one shift was trained. The second shift then learns from the first, second-hand, and each thing learned that way loses a detail.

Train each shift, or accept that settings will drift. If shift patterns make that hard, tell us and we will plan the visit around it — an engineer who arrives at two in the afternoon and leaves at six has met exactly one shift.

Keep the manual at the machine rather than in an office drawer. A manual nobody can reach is a manual nobody reads.