Most robot deployments look great in year one. The integrator is still engaged, the units are new, the OEM warranty is live, and anything that breaks gets handled by somebody else. Leadership sees the throughput numbers and signs off on phase two.

Year two is where the story changes, and it usually changes for reasons nobody put in the business case.

The coverage cliff is real and it is closer than you think

Look at what standard robotics warranties actually cover. Omron offers one year on spare parts as a baseline, extending to two years with parts and first-year labor if you register the unit. Mitsubishi Electric warrants robots for twenty-four months from installation or thirty months from shipment, whichever comes first. Cobot warranties across the major brands cluster in the same one-to-two-year range, with meaningful differences in what counts as labor versus parts.

Two details matter. First, the clock often starts at shipment, not at go-live, so a unit that sat in a crate for four months during a facility buildout is already burning coverage before it moves a single tote. Second, parts coverage and labor coverage are frequently not the same term. Plenty of operators discover in month fourteen that the replacement component is free and the technician is not.

None of that is a scandal. It is standard commercial practice. The problem is that most operating budgets are built as if year two looks like year one, and it does not.

Parts availability is the second surprise

Sourcing guidance across the automation supply chain in 2026 points to lead times on obsolete and legacy components running four to twelve weeks, with continued pressure on critical semiconductor-dependent parts. That is a very different maintenance reality than a same-week swap.

A four-to-twelve-week wait on one drive or one controller board does not take one robot out of service. In a tightly balanced cell, it takes a workflow out of service, or forces you to cannibalize a sister unit and turn one downed robot into two. Fleets that survive this have decided in advance which components they hold on the shelf. Fleets that do not are placing an emergency order and negotiating with a distributor while product sits.

The spare parts conversation is not exciting, and it never gets a slide in the deployment kickoff. It is also the single cheapest insurance policy an operator can buy.

What happens without a real program

There is a case that circulates in the AMR world worth keeping in mind: a fleet that ran at 97 percent uptime slid to 81 percent by month eight, because no structured maintenance program was ever stood up around it. Nothing was defective. The robots were simply run until they stopped, and the organization had no mechanism to catch the drift.

Sixteen points of uptime is not a maintenance statistic. It is a labor plan, a customer commitment, and a throughput forecast, all quietly failing at once. And it compounds, because reactive repair on a degraded unit costs more and takes longer than planned service on a healthy one.

By contrast, fleets that hit and hold high uptime past the first year tend to share the same unglamorous habits: scheduled service intervals that actually happen, someone who reads the fault logs rather than clearing them, a defined spares list, and a clear answer to who shows up when a unit goes down.

The multi-brand problem

Very few floors are single-vendor anymore. An operator might run AMRs from one manufacturer, a palletizing arm from another, a picking cell from a third, plus whatever came with the last acquisition. Each of those has its own warranty terms, its own service portal, its own parts channel, and its own escalation path.

That is a coordination job on top of a maintenance job. It is also why so many operators end up with uneven service quality across their own building: the brand with the strong local support gets attention, and the rest get run to failure.

OEMs are not the villains here. Building robots and running a distributed field service organization are genuinely different businesses, and scaling technicians across every geography a customer operates in is a hard problem for a manufacturer whose core competency is engineering and production. That gap is exactly why vendor-agnostic field service exists.

What to do before your warranties roll off

Pull the actual terms for every unit you own, and write down the real expiration date, the one measured from shipment where that applies. Separate parts coverage from labor coverage while you are in there.

Build a critical spares list per platform, weighted by lead time rather than by cost. The part that takes ten weeks matters more than the part that costs more.

Decide who holds the wrench. Internal maintenance, OEM contract, third-party service, or a mix. What you cannot afford is the default answer, which is that nobody has decided and the first failure sorts it out.

Then standardize the program across brands. One service calendar, one fault log review, one escalation path, regardless of who built the machine.

Where we fit

Robo Reliance exists for the part of the lifecycle the industry talks about least. The market is very good at building and deploying robots. It has been much quieter about keeping them running once the launch team goes home and the warranty runs out.

We service robots across brands, so a mixed floor gets one program instead of four. If your fleet is heading into year two, that is the right time to have this conversation, well before a controller board becomes a ten-week problem.

https://www.roboreliance.com | 800-838-0156 | info@roboreliance.com