A robot outlives its warranty by a decade. The cell was signed off in year one; the failures that stop production arrive in years three, five and seven, when the gripper leaks, a servo drive throws an encoder fault at the start of a shift, and the only person who can clear it is a service engineer four hundred kilometres away.
An annual maintenance contract is how you buy down that risk. It is also, in the Indian market, one of the easiest documents to sign and one of the hardest to enforce, because most contracts describe goodwill rather than obligations. This guide is the question set for the person who has to keep the cell running.
It assumes the cell is built and accepted. If it is not yet, the commissioning checklist covers what to verify before the first production shift, and choosing an integrator covers who should be standing behind it.
Warranty, guarantee and AMC are three different instruments
They get bundled in one quotation and behave completely differently when something breaks.
- Warranty covers defects in the equipment as supplied, for a fixed period, usually against the OEM’s or integrator’s terms. It is about what was wrong when it left the factory.
- Guarantee or performance bond ties money to an outcome: cycle time, availability, or a refund. Rare in small cells, valuable when you can define the outcome.
- AMC covers wear, consumables, labour and response for the life of the asset. It is about what happens next, and it is the only one you renew.
A warranty that starts at dispatch and ends twelve months later is worth very little on a cell that sat in a crate for six weeks. The contract questions for an integrator cover that trap; here the point is simpler: read the start date, and check that the AMC begins the day the warranty ends, not the day the invoice was raised.
Four contract shapes, and what each one actually buys
Suppliers use inconsistent names for these. Ask what is included, not what the tier is called.
| Shape | What is covered | What you still pay for | Fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Preventive only | Scheduled visits, inspection, lubrication, belt and cable checks, report | All parts, all breakdown labour | New cell inside warranty, low duty |
| Labour only (non-comprehensive) | Scheduled visits plus breakdown attendance | Parts | Two-shift cells with a stocked spares kit |
| Comprehensive | Visits, breakdown labour, defined parts list, consumables | Parts outside the list, damage, abuse | Production-critical cells |
| Availability-backed | Comprehensive plus a stated uptime, with service credits | Nothing, if the number is real and measured | Cells where a day of stoppage costs more than the contract |
The fourth is the one worth negotiating for, and the one most often sold without the measurement behind it. An availability figure means nothing unless the contract states how hours are counted, who counts them, and what credit follows a miss.
What a preventive visit should contain
A signature on a logbook is not a service. The report should show readings, not ticks:
- Battery voltage on controller and encoder backup, with the replacement threshold.
- Grease quantity and condition at each joint, and the axis hours since the last service.
- Belt tension, backlash and repeatability check on the axes that drive the process.
- Cable and dress-pack inspection at the wrist, where most fatigue failures begin.
- Air pressure and dew point at the cell, filter condition, leak check on gripper and vacuum circuits.
- Safety function test: guard interlocks, light curtain or scanner, E-stop circuits, and the stopping performance measurement behind them.
- Program and configuration backup taken that day, verified as readable, and stored off the controller.
Ask to see one completed report from another customer before signing. If the supplier cannot show a report with numbers in it, the visit is a walk-around.
Response time is a promise with three parts
“24-hour response” is not a specification. Break it into:
- Remote response. Time from your call to a competent engineer on the phone or remote session. Measured in hours, not days.
- On-site arrival. Time from the decision that remote support cannot fix it. This is where distance matters, and where a regional office earns its premium.
- Restoration. Time to production running again, which depends on the spare being in the country. No response clause survives a part that ships in three weeks.
Write all three into the contract, with the clock starting at a logged call to a named number, not at the supplier’s acknowledgement. Add an escalation path with names and mobile numbers, and a service credit that bites: a percentage of the annual fee per missed event, capped at a sensible share of the contract value so it stays enforceable rather than punitive.
Indian contract law limits recovery to reasonable compensation, so a credit that is clearly a penalty is harder to enforce than one that reflects your actual loss. Keep the number defensible.
Spares decide whether the contract works
Most downtime in Indian robot cells is not a failed robot. It is a failed gripper, a leaking vacuum generator, a proximity sensor, a contactor, or a cable that rubbed through. The AMC should therefore cover the cell, not only the arm.
Two questions separate a real contract from a brochure:
- Which parts are held in India, by whom, and at what lead time? Get the list. A stocked kit for your cell beats a promise of global availability.
- Which parts are excluded? Wear items — suction cups, seals, cables, batteries, teach pendant — are usually excluded, and they are also what fails most often. Price them into the annual budget instead of discovering them at 2 a.m.
If the contract excludes parts, buy your own critical spares kit at commissioning and keep it locked in the cell’s own cabinet, not in a central store two buildings away. The spare parts strategy for an Indian plant covers what belongs in that kit and how to justify each line.
How the price is built, and what to compare
There is no published rate card for robot AMC in India, and any figure quoted as normal should be treated as an anecdote. What you can compare is structure.
Quotes are usually built one of three ways: a percentage of the equipment value per year, a fixed fee per robot plus a per-visit charge, or a fee per shift-hour of cover. All three can be fair. The trap is comparing a preventive-only price against a comprehensive one, which is why the inclusion matrix matters more than the bottom line.
Illustrative arithmetic only, on a two-shift machine-tending cell valued at ₹30,00,000: a comprehensive contract priced at 6 per cent of equipment value is ₹1,80,000 a year, or ₹15,000 a month. If one unplanned stop costs the plant ₹40,000 in lost output and a stocked spare prevents two of them, the contract has paid for itself before the second incident. Substitute your own numbers; the structure of the calculation is the argument, not the percentages.
Check what escalates. A three-year contract with a fixed fee and a 5 per cent annual uplift is easier to budget than one that re-prices at each renewal against a list price the supplier controls.
Safety does not transfer with the contract
An AMC can include safety checks. It cannot transfer the duty to keep the cell safe. Under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 — which replaced the Factories Act, 1948 in November 2025 — that duty sits with the occupier, and a supplier’s obligations sit alongside it, not in place of it.
So insist that the preventive visit tests the safety functions, not just the mechanics, and that the report records the result. Guarding that has been modified to clear a jam, an interlock that was bypassed to keep the line moving, a light curtain that has drifted out of alignment — none of these show up in a grease report, and all of them are how people get hurt.
If the cell has been running for years, or has had a new product, gripper or layout pushed through it, a periodic safety audit is a separate exercise from the AMC. The safety audit of an existing robot cell covers what it should test and how to read the report; the standards behind it are in the robot safety standards that apply in India.
Do not let the contract become a dependency
A good AMC makes your team more capable, not less. Insist on:
- Program and configuration backups handed to you at every visit, in a format you can restore.
- Software licences registered in your company’s name, with the renewal route documented.
- Two of your maintenance engineers trained on first-line faults, with the training written into the contract.
- A fault history you own: every call logged with symptom, cause and fix, exportable.
- A written right to appoint another service provider at the end of the term, with handover of documentation.
A supplier who refuses the last one is telling you the contract is a lock, not a service.
Red flags in an Indian robot AMC
- One line item for the year. You cannot tell what is covered, so nothing is.
- Response time defined only in hours, with no on-site or restoration commitment.
- No parts list, and no statement of which parts are held in India.
- Preventive visits with no measurement in the report.
- Safety checks listed as “visual inspection” only.
- Automatic renewal with a re-pricing clause the supplier controls.
- No backups, no training, no exit clause.
- Cover limited to the robot arm while the cell around it fails.
If breakdown risk is what you are trying to price, the robot insurance guide for India sets out what machinery breakdown cover does and does not pay for.
Frequently asked questions
What does a robot AMC cost in India?
There is no published norm. Contracts are priced as a percentage of equipment value, a fixed fee per robot plus per-visit charges, or a fee per shift-hour of cover, and the price depends far more on what is included than on the robot model. Compare inclusion matrices, not headline fees, and price the excluded wear parts into your annual budget.
Is an AMC mandatory after the warranty ends?
No law requires one. What the law does require is that the cell stays safe to operate, and the occupier carries that duty. An AMC is the practical way to keep the safety functions tested and the asset maintained, but signing one does not discharge the duty.
What response time should I demand?
Set it from your own cost of stoppage, then test it against the supplier's geography. A useful structure is remote response in hours, on-site arrival within a stated working day, and restoration tied to the spare being in India. A short response time with a three-week part lead time is a number, not a commitment.
Can my own maintenance team service the robot instead?
Often yes, for first-line faults, if the team is trained and the OEM allows it without voiding remaining warranty. Keep the AMC for the periodic safety function testing, software and the faults that need OEM diagnostics. Self-maintenance without backups and without trained staff usually costs more than the contract it replaces.
Should the AMC cover the whole cell or just the robot?
The whole cell. Most stoppages come from grippers, sensors, cabling, pneumatics and the PLC, not from the arm. A contract that covers only the robot leaves the parts that actually fail on your side of the line.
What should be excluded from the contract?
Wear items are normally excluded: suction cups, seals, cables, batteries, teach pendant, and damage from collisions or unauthorised modifications. That is acceptable if you stock them and if the contract says clearly how they are ordered and at what lead time.
Sources and further reading
- IBF Solutions — the 2025 editions of EN ISO 10218-1 and -2 for industrial robots
- CEN-CENELEC — the 2023 edition of EN ISO 13849-1 on safety-related parts of control systems
- PRS Legislative Research — the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020
- International Federation of Robotics — World Robotics 2025 press release
