About / four differences you can check before you reply
Every Quotation on Your Desk Says Yes.
Four Places Where Ours Says a Number Instead
You have specifications that agree with each other and suppliers that agree with you. What separates them is not in the yes — it is in what each one is willing to put on a page and be held to.
Nothing below is a claim about how large we are. All four can be checked before you write back.
The quotations agree with each other, which is the problem
Ask any of them whether they can build your pack and the answer comes back yes. The differences are in the parts nobody wrote down.
A yes costs nothing to give
The figures arrive later, if at all
The disagreement surfaces at commissioning
What we sell sits between two points: cells inside your gate, and tested packs off the far end. Cell manufacturing upstream of that gate is a different plant with different equipment, and none of it is ours — the scope itself is set out on the home page. This page is only about the four places where a quotation can be checked, and most of them are not.
Four words that make two quotations look identical, and what each means here
These four carry most of the apparent agreement between specifications. None of them has a single industry meaning.
Turnkey
What it can cover
What it covers here
Automatic
What it can cover
What it covers here
The pack segment is mostly manual positions, and it is labelled that way
PPM
What it can cover
What it covers here
Annual capacity
What it can cover
What it covers here
Two specifications can use all four words, agree on all four, and describe different projects. Before comparing prices it is worth making each supplier say which of these meanings they are using — the answers separate quotations faster than the prices do.
Five kinds of pack, and the point where our published figures stop
The order below is the order the line was configured around. It is worth knowing which end of it you are at before spending a fortnight on quotations.
- 01Commercial and industrial storage packs Written up on this site
- 02Utility-scale storage packs Written up on this site
- 03Residential storage packs Written up on this site
- 04EV battery modules and packs Written up on this site
- 05Cylindrical and consumer-cell packs Named, no published figures
The first four run the same two segments
The fifth is where the published figures stop
If your pack is in the fifth group, the useful first message says so. A named machine with no published figure is not a machine you can compare, and it is cheaper to find that out in a first reply than after two weeks of drawings.
The line is built to your cell, and the range it will not take is printed
Being buildable to your cell is what every supplier says. The checkable version of that sentence is a published range with an edge on it.
The check happens before the price
The envelope is three ranges and two ceilings
Inside the range is a starting answer
The five figures above are the ones worth copying into your next email. A supplier who cannot produce the equivalent has not declined to answer — they have not been asked the question yet.
Take this one to the other quotations
“Ask each supplier for the cell dimensions their line will refuse.”
A yes given outside the envelope is paid for after the bay is committed
Three of the four differences change how well a project goes. This one changes whether it can happen at all.
- Why this one
It is the only one that decides whether you can buy at all
A cell the station sequence cannot present, stack, press or address is not a tooling detail. It is a different line, and no amount of goodwill later turns it back into this one. - Without a published edge
Every supplier can say yes, because nothing says where the yes stops
Nobody is lying. The question was never asked in a form that could be answered wrongly. The specification stays agreeable right up to the point where it has to meet a physical part. - Who pays, and when
It lands as tooling on stations that are already paid for
Not at quotation, where it would have been a conversation. It arrives on a floor that is already committed and a schedule that is already being reported upward. The cost is not in the equipment. It is in the weeks, and they come out of a project that is already running. - What we do about it
The ranges are published, attached to the build they belong to
Your drawing is checked against them before a price exists. If it is outside, the first reply says outside, and says what would have to change. The 587 Ah large-format cell is exactly that case: under consideration for future compatibility, not something this line does today, and it is written that way where it appears. - What proves it
One cell of that table is labelled instead of filled
A specification that answers every dimension question has either engineered your plant already, or has stopped distinguishing between what it knows and what it is willing to say. See the table
A supplier who has never printed a limit has never had to defend one. The limits are the part of a specification that costs something to publish — which is why so few of them are there.
Published
On request
A figure on a public page is a figure we cannot revise for you
Not that the figures exist — most suppliers have them. That they are printed where every buyer reads the same one.
The figure you read is the figure the next buyer reads
Two examples, and they are not the interesting part
Published figures are what make a comparison possible
The next section is the whole list — every figure this site publishes, and the page it lives on. It deliberately carries no values, because a figure repeated away from the position it judges is a figure that will eventually disagree with itself.
Take this one to the other quotations
“Ask which of their figures you can read without emailing them.”
Every figure this site publishes, and the page it is stated on
Take any row, open the page, read the number off it. That is the whole use of this section.
Each figure is stated once
This table carries no values
It is a checklist, not an argument
Battery manufacturing equipment
Battery pack EOL testing
Pack line capacity planning
Energy storage battery pack line
Module segment · Pack segment
Send the cell drawing and the bay, and get the checks run against them
Your cell against the published envelope, your bay against the published footprints. Two attachments, and the first reply tells you whether there is a project here at all.
Reply within 24 hours / If your cell is outside the range, the first reply says so
Automation buys one operator in the module segment, and that is what gets published
Headcount is the figure that repeats every year the line runs, which is why it is worth being exact about how small the difference is.
The pack segment does not shrink
One build’s headcount is nowhere on this site
So headcount is not the reason to move up a build
Take this one to the other quotations
“Ask which positions disappear when automation goes up, and by how many people.”
Four kinds of number on this site, and only one class is fixed for you
Knowing which class a figure belongs to is what stops you planning against one that was never going to hold still.
Fixed, whoever you are
Set by your building
Set by your parts
Not published
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A figure in the wrong class is worse than a missing one, because it gets planned against and then moves.
The figure the line is judged on is in the quotation, not agreed at commissioning
An acceptance criterion introduced after the equipment ships is a negotiation. One written at quotation is a specification.
The figure
The definitions
The criteria underneath
Where it ends up
A yield figure without its exclusions is not a figure
This is the difference that survives into the contract
Take this one to the other quotations
“Ask for the acceptance figure and what it excludes, in the quotation rather than at commissioning.”
There are no photographs on this site, and the captions say so
Every image here is a rendering of the equipment, labelled as one. No workshop shots, no site images, no people.
A photograph would not have told you about your line
What is carrying the weight instead
If images are what you need, the question worth asking every supplier is which of theirs are photographs of a delivered line and which are renderings. The answer separates more quotations than the images do. The next three sections are the rest of what is deliberately not here, and each one is missing for a different reason.
What this site publishes, and what it leaves out because it would not be checkable
The right-hand column is the list an about page is normally built from. Every item on it is a claim you would have to take on trust.
On this site — attached to a position, a page or a document
- Machine parameters, each on the page that owns the position it judges
- Station lists with their automation labels, position by position
- Cell, module and pack compatibility ranges, with the build each set belongs to
- Takt, footprint and installed power per configuration, and headcount where the source data agrees with itself
- Line acceptance yield, with the exclusions that define it
- Certifications by name: ISO 9001, CE, RoHS
Not on this site — and what you would have had to do with it
- Employee count — take our word for it
- Floor area — take our word for it
- Lines delivered — take our word for it
- Countries served — take our word for it
- Customer count — take our word for it
- Patent count — take our word for it
None of those six is unknown to us. They are left out because there is no move available to you after reading them — and a page full of figures that cannot be acted on trains a buyer to skip the ones that can.
No customer names, no case studies, no signed testimonials, no ratings
A different reason from the section above: this one is not about what you could check, but about there being nobody to name.
A named line belongs to whoever built it
An unnamed reference is not evidence
What stands in their place
The substitution is worth making explicit, because it changes what to compare. Compare the criteria a supplier will be judged by, not the customers they say they have had — the first is about your project, the second is about theirs.
Three things this site does not state yet, and what would put each one here
The fourth reason, and the only one with an end date: these are not unknowable and not unnameable — they are undecided.
Lead time
Warranty term
Certificate numbers
What would resolve each
A quoted lead time is a commitment or it is nothing
What you can do in the meantime
What a first reply contains, and the one thing it will not contain
What to send is on the contact page. This is only about what comes back.
Within 24 hours
The checks, run against what you sent
Not a price for a plant nobody has seen
Where two configurations both fit, the reply says both fit. There is no technical reason manufactured for the larger one — the tier page publishes the figures either way, including the ones that do not favour the upgrade.
Four questions that separate four quotations, this one included
This is the part to take away: four lines that can be pasted into an email and sent to every supplier on the list.
What cell dimensions will your line refuse?
Which of your figures can I read without emailing you?
How many operators staff each segment, per configuration?
What figure goes into the acceptance document, and what does it exclude?
Where a quotation has no answer to one of these, that absence is itself the comparison — and it is a great deal cheaper to collect four non-answers this week than one at commissioning.
Ask the other quotations the same four questions
The four differences above are the ones that survive into a contract.
Then see which of them answers in numbers
