Lesson 34: Commissioning and Acceptance, Instructor Session Plan

Two class sessions, one document. Session A is acceptance: the FAT we run, the SAT the customer owns, sustained statistical rate validation, punch list, and training. Session B is the service model: SLA, warranty boundary, remote-diagnostics ownership, spares handover, and O and M documentation. It all rolls up to the commissioning plan, the headline deliverable for this part of the program. Two lines every student leaves holding: we own the FAT, the customer owns the SAT criteria; and a service model a real maintenance team can't live with is not a plan, it's a promise that breaks on the first bad night.

Session A Run of Show (60-minute)

Segment	Min	What happens
Open on the two-test frame	6	Read the hook. Two tests, two owners: our FAT before it ships, the customer's SAT on their floor under real load. Establish that neither is a formality before you touch any theory.
FAT: our firm, our scripts	16	Walk the FAT. We own it, at the shop, before shipping. Scripts exercise every routing decision, every handshake, every exception, including the deliberate failure when the WMS does not answer in time. Tie it to the Lesson 20 controls standards the scripts exercise; name that home and do not re-teach it here.
SAT: sustained, statistical, signed	20	The SAT is the customer's, on the customer's criteria. Sustained rate against the design target under real load, not one good minute. Confirm the WMS handshake at real volume, not on the bench. Punch list, then customer training, then sign-off. Run the two-minute-demo trap here (key moment below).
Riverside SAT criteria build	14	Make the room derive Riverside's SAT criteria from the numbers already on the table. Do not hand them the criteria. Hold the FAT/SAT ownership line if anyone tries to blur the two.
Close Session A	4	Restate the ownership line: we own the FAT, the customer owns what it takes to accept the system. Preview Session B with one question: who keeps it running after we leave?
Total	60	Session A. Acceptance proven and signed.

Session B Run of Show (60-minute)

Segment	Min	What happens
Open on 2 a.m.	6	Run THINK LIKE THE OPERATOR cold. One maintenance person, system down before the morning wave. Design the service model from that moment backward, not from a template forward. Set the frame for everything that follows.
The service model	16	SLA, warranty boundary, remote-diagnostics ownership. Design each to the customer's actual maintenance capability. Remote-diagnostics ownership is a service decision here; the OT network itself, its cybersecurity and remote-access architecture, is Lesson 21. Name that home and stop.
Spares, O and M, walkthrough, go-live	16	Spares by criticality: Lesson 26 derived the strategy, this lesson hands it over with its logic. O and M documentation delivered. The maintenance team gets walked through every serviceable component and how to reach it. You are present and reachable at go-live.
Riverside service model + plan assembly	16	Michael's team-of-one constraint is the design driver for the whole model. Have the room assemble the full commissioning plan across both sessions: FAT script outline, SAT criteria, rate-validation method, punch-list template, training plan, service model.
Forest and close	6	The commissioning plan is the headline deliverable for this part of the program. Close the delivery arc: proven at the FAT, accepted at the SAT, kept running by a service model built for a real team.
Total	60	Session B. The service model designed and the commissioning plan assembled.

Combined half-day option:

Run Session A and Session B back to back with a short break between them. Keep the two 60-minute shapes intact; the break lands cleanly on the Session A close, right after the two-test frame is proven and before the service model opens.
If the room is strong and moving fast, spend the recovered minutes on the Riverside build, not on more lecture. The commissioning plan is the work; the lecture is the setup.

KEY TEACHING MOMENT | SESSION A

Give the room a system that "passed" on a clean two-minute demo. Then describe the real day: the wave release compresses volume, a truck landed three hours late, and the floor is stacked. Ask what proof they would actually accept before they sign.

Steer them to sustained statistical validation against the design target under real load, not one good minute. Push the second half too: the WMS handshake has to be confirmed at real volume, producing correct routing decisions under the load the operation runs, not answering cleanly on the bench. The student who accepts on the demo has not proven the system. They have watched it demonstrated on a good day.

KEY TEACHING MOMENT | SESSION B

Put Michael the maintenance lead in the room. Team of one, twenty years on the site, two failed systems behind him. Have the students design the service model to what one person can do at 2 a.m.

The students who design to a generic template fail him. The ones who design to his actual capability keep the system alive: an honest SLA, a clean warranty boundary, remote-diagnostics ownership assigned, and spares stocked by criticality so the part that stops the line is the part on the shelf. Make them name the trade-off out loud, because a four-hour, around-the-clock SLA and a maintenance team of one do not fit together without a deliberate decision about what "response" actually means.

WATCH-FORS

Five failures show up in this lesson. Drive each one back to a single question: who owns this test, and can this maintenance team actually live with this model?

Students who treat the FAT and the SAT as the same test. They are two tests with two owners in two places. Separate them out loud.
Students who let the customer define the FAT, or let our firm set the SAT criteria. Hold the ownership line firmly. We own the FAT; the customer owns the SAT criteria.
Students who accept on a single good run. Rate validation is statistical and sustained. One clean minute is a demonstration, not a proof.
Students who design an SLA a one-person team cannot meet. A service level a team cannot physically deliver is not a service level.
Students who hand over spares with no criticality logic. A shelf of parts nobody chose on purpose is not a spares strategy.

RIVERSIDE FACILITATION | DO NOT TELL THEM, ASK

Build the commissioning plan on Riverside across both sessions. Do not hand the room the SAT criteria. Make them derive the criteria from what they already know: Dana's stated 20 CPM design target, the roughly three percent misdirect rate the project exists to eliminate, and Ray's confirmed one-second WMS latency under peak load. If a student states a criterion, ask where the number came from. If it is not in the source, it is invented, and a criterion the customer never agreed to is not the customer's criterion.

For the FAT, have them write the test scripts to exercise the scan-to-WMS-to-divert handshake and, deliberately, the exception path when the WMS misses the one-second window. In Session B, make Michael's team-of-one the design driver for the whole service model, SLA to spares. Hold the FAT/SAT ownership line every time it blurs.

CHECKPOINT ANSWER KEY | NOT IN THE STUDENT PAGE

The student page carries the two questions with no answers. Here is what a strong answer sounds like. There is a well-reasoned answer and a poorly-reasoned one; listen for the reasoning, not a keyword.

SAT and rate validation. Before calling it accepted: a sustained statistical run at the design target under real wave-release load, the WMS handshake confirmed in the field at real volume, the punch list cleared, and customer training done, then sign-off. The demo proves the system can hit the number once, on a good minute. Compressed wave releases are the real constraint, and a sustained run is the only proof that the system holds the number when the volume arrives the way it actually arrives. A student who accepts the demo is accepting a demonstration on a good day.
Service model for a team of one. A defensible design ties the SLA to what one person can physically do, draws the warranty boundary cleanly in writing before a failure, assigns remote-diagnostics ownership as a service decision, and stocks spares by criticality so the part that stops the line is on the shelf. A well-reasoned answer names spares-by-criticality (or the honest SLA) as the piece that matters most for a one-person team, because at 2 a.m. a single person with the right part on the shelf and clear documentation gets the line back before the morning wave, and one without it does not. Accept any well-reasoned choice; grade the justification, not the pick.

INSTRUCTOR ONLY | DO NOT SHARE WITH STUDENTS

The commissioning plan is the project-folder artifact that closes the whole delivery arc. The disciplined student has been building toward it since the handoff, note by dated note, without being told where it led. When they assemble the FAT outline, the SAT criteria, the rate-validation method, the punch list, the training plan, and the service model into one plan, that is the payoff of the project-folder habit you have reinforced since Lesson 1.

Do not announce it. Let the students who kept organized notes feel the difference when the plan comes together from work they already had in hand, while the ones who did not are assembling it from scratch under time pressure. That contrast is the lesson. Name the habit as normal and professional, and leave the reveal to the moment it lands on its own.