The first week after a sorting line goes live rarely looks like the commissioning plan. Conveyor speeds that worked during dry runs behave differently once product actually flows, and the settings that looked right on paper need real batches to prove themselves. This post walks through what that week usually involves, based on what we see when we visit facilities running our equipment for the first time.

Day one is mostly about watching the optical sorters handle the actual crop. Calibration files loaded in the workshop assume a certain size distribution, but every harvest brings variation. Chaff loads, moisture levels, and the percentage of broken kernels all shift between loads. The practical move is to keep a sample log for the first few shifts, noting which settings held up and which needed a nudge.

Air pressure is the setting that gets adjusted most often. Too high and you start rejecting good product; too low and defects slip through. On the first day we usually see operators err on the side of caution, which means higher rejection rates than the line should produce. By day three, after comparing output against manual grading checks, the pressure settings settle into a range that makes sense for that particular crop.

Packaging integration follows a similar curve. The bagger and the metal detector have their own tolerances, and the timing between the scale and the sealing station needs a few hundred cycles before it feels stable. The first runs tend to produce more giveaway than the target, not because the equipment is wrong, but because the feedback loop between the checkweigher and the filler has not been tuned to the actual product density.

By the end of the week, the picture is usually clear. The line runs at a predictable rate, the rejection percentage is within the range agreed during the site audit, and the maintenance team has a list of small adjustments to carry into the next production cycle. That list matters more than the initial performance numbers, because it tells us where the next round of tuning should focus.

If you are planning a similar startup or want to compare notes on your own first week, the contact page is the quickest way to reach our service team. For more context on how we approach these projects, the planning notes from a recent session cover the decisions that happen before the line ever ships.