A controls firm's best designer is sent to bring up a conveyor and sortation line at a warehouse three hundred kilometres away. The plan says two weeks. The mechanical contractor is late, the customer's electricians are pulled onto another job, and the posting stretches to six. Back at the office two quotations wait for her drawings, and a factory test slips. She returns exhausted, finds her appraisal mentions the delayed drawings, and starts taking recruiter calls.
The firm treated commissioning as something designers do between drawings. It is a different job with its own skills, its own hours and its own wear. Owners who recognise that, and staff it accordingly, keep both their designers and their site people longer.
How the mix-up shows on the floor
- Design deadlines slip whenever a big job reaches site, because the same people are on both.
- One or two engineers carry most of the travel register, usually the ones who complain least.
- Site allowances are agreed person by person on the phone, so two engineers on one posting are paid differently.
- Nobody owns the rest day after a return; it happens when someone remembers.
- Junior engineers go to site alone because the seniors are needed at the desk.
- Appraisals judge site people on design output they had no time to produce.
- The site kit of programming cables, spare relays, a clamp meter and licensed laptop lives in one engineer's car boot.
What a posting actually involves
A typical posting opens with a gate induction, a contractor's pass and a permit-to-work briefing at the customer's safety office. The engineer unpacks a clamp meter, an insulation tester, a loop calibrator, spare fuses and a laptop carrying every licence the job needs. Mornings vanish into point-to-point checks while electricians are still glanding cables. Afternoons go on dry runs, then wet runs with real product. Evenings bring a progress mail to the office and a call home from a guest-house corridor. Somebody who thrives on that rhythm is precious. Somebody who dreads it should never be drafted into it by default.
The bill for treating site work as a side duty
The direct cost is slower delivery on both fronts. Design work queues while its owner stands at a customer's gate. Site work drags too. A desk-minded engineer is slower at loop checks, I/O checkout and live fault-finding than someone who does it monthly. Extra days on site mean extra lodging, extra travel and a later final payment.
The larger cost is people. Engineers who never chose site life leave for desk roles. Engineers who like site life leave for firms that pay for it properly. Either way the person walking out is often the one customers trusted most on the plant floor.
Why firms keep folding the two together
In a small firm it seems logical that whoever wrote the program should start it up. Customers also ask for the designer by name. A separate site team looks like overhead when orders are lumpy. And there is rarely a written pay rule for site work, so it is cheaper in the short run to ask the same willing people again. Each reason is understandable. Together they turn site work into an unpriced favour.
Start with the travel claims
Sort a year of travel claims and lodging bills by name, and total the site weeks for each engineer. Then mark which of those engineers also owned design deliverables in the same months, and whether those deliverables slipped. The pattern usually jumps out: a handful of names carrying most of the road, and a design calendar that bends around them.
Building commissioning as its own role
- 1
Write a separate role profile
List what the commissioning engineer owns: I/O checkout, loop and interlock checks, cycle-time proving, operator training, punch-list closure and the customer's acceptance signature. Our role design work uses this kind of outcome list.
- 2
Select for site temperament
Test calm under a shouting production head, structured fault-finding with a meter and a laptop, and comfort living away. These matter more than drawing speed.
- 3
Keep base pay apart from site allowances
Write down daily allowance, lodging standard, travel-day treatment and weekend work. Apply it to everyone on the posting, so nobody bargains alone.
- 4
Set rest and rotation rules
A rest day after returning from a long posting, a team-agreed limit on consecutive weeks away, and a desk spell between big jobs. Record them in the attendance and shift process so they are applied, not remembered.
- 5
Hand over properly from design to site
Before the posting, the designer walks the site engineer through the logic and the design intent at factory test. The site engineer then owns the job on the plant floor.
- 6
Debrief after every posting
Half an hour on what broke, what the customer asked for and what design should change next time. It keeps the two teams learning from each other.
A growth path that keeps people on the road
Site engineers leave when the only promotion is back to a desk. Draw the ladder: commissioning engineer, senior commissioning engineer who can run a site alone, site lead who manages contractors and the customer, then service head or project manager. Tie each step to evidence, such as sites closed without callback and juniors trained on site. Many firms also make the senior site role the owner of permits and lock-out on the customer's floor. The robot-cell safety guidance shows how that duty can be framed.
Keeping designers close to the plant floor
Separating the roles does not mean designers never leave the office. They join the first days on complex jobs, take remote calls from site and read every debrief. The page on how controls integrators handle rotas and comp-off shows how site cover can be planned. Pay for travelling engineers gets its own treatment in structuring pay for site engineers. The other patterns in this trade are gathered on our hub for automation and robotics employers.
