Instead of making a large investment to buy and own automation equipment, you can lease the equipment for a contracted amount of time and usage. Our model takes the burden and risk away from you. There is zero upfront cost and you only pay for operating time at a low hourly rate.
Formic owns and supports the equipment. As a part of our full-service offering, Formic handles everything - from equipment installation and operator training to all predictive and reactive maintenance necessary to maximize uptime at no additional cost to you.
Equipment leases typically cover the cost of hardware and engineering only, and do not include engineering studies, performance guarantees, equipment reprogramming, or maintenance. Our RaaS model is built to be all-inclusive.
We support a variety of applications in manufacturing and logistics: welding, machine tending, palletizing and depalletizing, case packing, bin picking, surface sanding, and more.
The machine operators are responsible for receiving training. Per our agreement, you must designate one or more employees to receive training on the system.
Contracts are unique to each customer and can vary from 1-6 years.
Our business model is built off of a simple premise: we are not successful unless our customers are producing. All of our robots are backed by our Formic Guarantee, which features 5 lines of defense, the most severe of which is a full replacement at Formic’s cost. In summary, we proactively and reactively support your automation system, and you are only invoiced for the operating hours when the equipment meets your requirements. Any accrued downtime is credited to your account for future use, or you can alternatively choose to be reimbursed with the dollar-value compensation.
The billed hourly rate depends on the application, your usage rate, and contract lifetime, but it ranges from $8 per hour to $40 per hour. In general, longer contracts, simpler applications, and higher usage equate to lower hourly wage. Our systems typically save customers 42% on their OpEx relative to manual labor on the first day.
Scoping to deployment can occur in as little as 8 weeks. The actual time depends on your application and how quickly we can gather the info we need and lead time of the all the components we need to purchase.
In almost all cases, we can offer a buy-out option in the contract. After the buyout, you are responsible for uptime of the equipment and service provided by Formic will be billed based on time, labor, and material cost.
To address changeovers and future needs, we offer one free programming addition per year, barring any new hardware. In the event that new hardware is needed, we can work with you in one of three ways: 1) Increase the contract term to offset the additional system cost. 2) Increase the hourly billing rate for the remainder of the contract. 3) Pass through the additional cost in one single payment.