By The Robo Reliance Team
Most robot deployments start the same way. One site. One champion. A vendor team on the floor for weeks. Lots of attention, lots of hands, and a steady stream of small fixes that never make it into anyone's report.
Then the pilot works, and the real question shows up: what happens when you roll it out to the next building?
That question is getting more common. DC Velocity reported on October 26 that GXO plans to expand its use of Agility Robotics' Digit humanoid robots to distribution centers in Statesville, North Carolina and Lebanon, Tennessee, starting in early 2027. The expansion builds on a deployment in Flowery Branch, Georgia, where the companies say Digit has moved more than 100,000 totes. Agility CEO Peggy Johnson put it this way: customers are moving beyond asking whether humanoid robots can work to deciding where they can scale them.
That shift, from "can it work" to "where do we scale it," is exactly where service planning tends to break. Not because the robots change, but because the support around them does not travel as well as the hardware.
Why site one is misleading
The first site gets things the second and third sites usually do not.
It gets the vendor's best people, often on site, often for months. It gets an internal champion who knows every quirk because they lived through commissioning. It gets patience from leadership, because everyone expects a pilot to be bumpy. And it gets informal fixes: a reset here, a recalibration there, a workaround someone figured out on a Tuesday night that never got written down.
All of that is real support. Very little of it is documented, and almost none of it is in the contract.
When you open site two, the vendor team is spread thinner, the champion is still at site one, and the people running the new floor are learning the robots from scratch. The service model you thought you had was partly a set of people who happened to be in the building.
The math changes faster than headcount
Here is a simple way to see it. Say each site runs 10 units, and each unit needs two short first-level interventions a week, about 15 minutes each. That is 10 x 2 x 15 = 300 minutes, or 5 hours a week per site.
At one site, 5 hours a week gets absorbed by whoever is nearby. At three sites, it is 15 hours a week, and it is happening in three different buildings, often in different states. Nobody absorbs that by accident. Someone has to own it at every location, or it turns into downtime while people wait for help.
Those numbers are deliberately modest. Your fleet may need more or less, and the right figure is the one in your own intervention logs. The point is that support load scales with sites, not just with units, because each building needs its own hands.
What to standardize before site two
The good news is that most of what made site one work can be captured, if you do it on purpose and before the rollout.
Write down the tribal knowledge. Every recurring fault, every reset sequence, every workaround from site one belongs in a runbook the next site can use on day one.
Name a fleet health owner at every site. Not the vendor. Not a shared inbox. A person on your team who owns the queue, triages first, and knows when to escalate.
Train first-level responders locally. The goal is not to turn operators into technicians. It is to make sure the simple stuff gets handled in minutes by someone who is already there.
Set one fault logging standard across sites. If each building logs issues differently, you cannot compare sites, spot repeat failures, or plan spares. Same fields, same categories, everywhere.
Plan critical spares per site. Parts sitting in site one do not help site three. Decide what each building needs on hand based on what actually fails.
Put the escalation path in writing, per brand. Many floors run more than one robot vendor. For each, know who you call, what they need from you, and what happens if they cannot come.
Clarify what the service agreement covers at the new sites. Some deployments run under robots as a service agreements that bundle support. Read exactly what is included, where, and what your own team is still expected to handle.
Who keeps it running across the network
Scaling robots across a network of sites is an operations problem as much as a technology one. The builders are focused on building and shipping. Your site leaders are focused on throughput. The gap in the middle is who keeps a growing, multi-site, often multi-brand fleet healthy week after week.
That gap is the work Robo Reliance does. We are a vendor-agnostic service partner for robot fleets: preventive maintenance, first-level support programs, field service, and the documentation and logging discipline that lets site two run like site one without needing the same people in the building.
If your pilot worked and you are planning the rollout, now is the time to plan who keeps it running. That conversation is a lot easier before the robots arrive at the next dock door than after.
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