What breaks when robotics hardware moves from prototype to production?

Prototypes tolerate ambiguity. The engineer who built the prototype knows which parts fit, what to hand-tweak, and what to accept as close enough. That institutional knowledge does not transfer to a supplier. When production starts, every assumption has to be explicit—in the drawing, the BOM, the assembly sequence, or the test procedure. Suppliers build what is in the files, not what was intended.

BOM revision control is almost always missing. Parts substituted during prototyping don't make it back into the BOM. The production build uses the wrong part, and the root cause is invisible until someone opens a failed unit. Underdefined tolerances are the second most common gap—critical fits that worked at five units because an engineer hand-selected mating parts will fail at fifty units when the supplier uses random-draw assembly.

Before routing a build to production, KnowYi audits the BOM for revision drift, flags substitutions against the original spec, checks component availability against current lead times, and requires a documented first-article inspection against the 2D drawings before releasing the full lot. We structure the build record so deviations are captured, not lost.

Send your most recent BOM with any revision notes or substitution records, CAD files, 2D drawings, Gerbers, and any documentation of changes made during prototyping—even informal notes. The more context we have about what changed, the better we can audit the gap.