The questions that come up before a quote

That is the first conversation, and it happens before anything is quoted. We look at the part, the rate you need to hold, and the constraint that is actually costing you — which is often not the station you think it is. If the numbers do not work, we say so. An integrator who only ever finds a reason to sell you a cell is not giving you an assessment.

The part, the rate, and what is in the way. A sample part or a phone video of the station running does more than a specification document. From there we can usually tell you on the first call whether it is a robot problem, a handling problem, or a fixturing problem.

Yes, and most of the work is exactly that. New robot, vision and control systems get integrated into lines that are already running rather than replacing them — retrofits into an existing floor, not just greenfield installs. It preserves the capital already sitting in your machines and it is usually the faster path to rate.

The whole job. Assessment, CAD and cell design, fabrication, the control panel, the robot programming, the HMI, runoff on your floor and the as-built documentation — all out of the Seneca Castle shop. There is no integrator-to-fabricator gap for you to manage, and one number to call when it needs tuning a year later.

The regular working radius is New York State in full plus the states bordering it: Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont. 12 markets have their own page because that is where we are close enough to be genuinely local. Past those, distance is a scheduling question rather than a yes-or-no one — and it is worth knowing that work has already gone considerably further: Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, Colorado. Travel is quoted in the open, with mobilization, on-site days and return visits as line items you can see rather than absorbed into a rate that quietly grows. What usually decides an out-of-state job is not the miles: one scoped well enough that commissioning is a planned block of days travels fine, and a vague one does not travel at all. If what you need is somebody who can be on your floor within the hour on a bad morning, that is a fair reason to hire a shop in your own state, and we will say so on the call.

Fanuc, Yaskawa Motoman, Denso, ABB, Kawasaki, Epson and Universal Robots. The certifications are FANUC-specific — TMD is a FANUC Authorized System Integrator, certified in HandlingPro and PalletPro — so FANUC is the deepest bench. On Epson, Denso and Kawasaki there is significant hands-on experience rather than a certification, which is a distinction worth being straight about. In practice the right answer is usually whichever brand your maintenance team already supports.

Underestimating the end-of-arm tooling and the fixturing. The best programming in the world cannot compensate for a gripper that drops one bag in two hundred, or a fixture that does not repeat. Tooling is designed and built in-house here for that reason — it is the part of the cell that decides whether it still holds rate on a Friday afternoon.

A robot holds the same stacking pattern at the same rate all shift, and it reprograms for a new case size instead of retraining. Palletizing bags and boxes is one of the jobs TMD is asked for most, usually because the manual version is the station that burns through people fastest.

Both are integrated here, and the choice follows the application rather than a house preference. In practice Cognex tends to get picked for harder part-identification work and Keyence for high-speed code reading, but the part, the finish and the lighting decide it. We evaluate against your actual part before recommending a platform.

When manual inspection cannot keep pace with the line, when the cost of a defect reaching your customer is high, or when you need traceability rather than a spot check. Vision inspects every part at line rate instead of sampling after the fact — the trade is that it has to be designed in, because lighting and optics decide what a camera can see.

Because it links a physical part to its production record without anyone touching a keyboard. Vision-based barcode and 2D code reading works at speed and without contact, which makes traceability practical on a running line and prevents mix-ups where several variants share one line.

Allen Bradley, Automation Direct, Omron, Siemens, Schneider and Mitsubishi. TMD is an SI Direct integrator for Automation Direct. The panel and the code come out of the same shop, which is why the drawings still match the panel a year later.

Panels designed and built in-house to UL 508A, by a UL 508A Qualified Manufacturing Technical Representative. In practice that means schematic and CAD design for your machine rather than a catalog layout, enclosure layout and component selection with thermal load accounted for, wiring and assembly labeled to the drawings, PLC, HMI, drive and safety integration, and as-built drawings handed over at the end.

Typically some combination of light curtains, safety mats, guard-door interlocks and 3D area scanners, tied into a safety circuit that stops the cell when a boundary is crossed. The design question is rarely which devices — it is laying them out so operators can still load, clear a jam and service the cell without the guarding giving back the cycle time you just bought. Which devices a given machine actually requires is settled by the risk assessment, not by preference.

Yes. The assessment lists every foreseeable hazard on the machine, evaluates each one for severity, frequency and probability, and determines a required safety performance level along with the guarding, circuits and logic needed to reach it. It is handed over as a document — Excel or Word — so it is on file when an insurer, an auditor or your own EHS group asks for it. Most integrators quote guarding; the assessment is what establishes which guarding the machine actually needs.

Yes, and it is the normal way a job runs. Current industry safety practice is the baseline every machine is built to; whatever your own plant standard, EHS group, insurer or end customer requires on top of that gets designed in from the start and documented, rather than retrofitted after runoff. Send the specification with the inquiry — if it calls out particular documents or a certifying body, that gets scoped at quote so there is no argument about it later.

Yes, and that is usually where the real exposure sits. Machines that predate current practice can be re-guarded and have their safety circuits reworked without replacing the machine. It is one of the more common reasons a plant calls.