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Who Can Sign the Handover? Confirm It Before Mobilization
The crew packs up after twelve days on site. All panels are labelled, the wiring is clean, and the commissioning test results are attached. You send the handover document to the site contact, the same person who let your team through the gate every morning.
Three weeks later, the document comes back. The factory’s finance team will not process payment without a signature from the plant manager, not the facilities coordinator. The plant manager has been traveling. Nobody flagged this before the work started.
This is the sign-off chain problem. It is one of the most common reasons a completed project does not invoice for weeks after the crew leaves, and it is almost entirely preventable.
Why the Three Roles in Factory Electrical Work Are Rarely the Same Person
In commercial and industrial electrical work in Thailand, most projects involve at least three distinct roles on the customer side:
- The person who commissions the work: procurement staff, a project manager, or the managing director of a smaller factory
- The person who manages site access: a facilities coordinator, safety officer, or EHS manager
- The person who can authorize final acceptance: the plant manager, chief engineer, or head of maintenance
On a smaller site, one person may cover two of these roles. On a larger factory, they are often three separate people in three separate departments. The authorized signatory is the one whose signature unlocks your invoice. Finding out their name for the first time when you send the handover document means you are already behind.
What Makes Someone an Authorized Signatory?
The question matters because it is not a matter of seniority alone. An authorized signatory, for the purposes of a technical handover, is the person whose approval is accepted by the customer’s own accounts payable or procurement process as release for payment.
In practice, for Thai factory electrical work, this is typically:
- The plant manager or plant director
- The head of engineering or maintenance
- An engineer with specific delegated authority
A facilities coordinator who signs your document may be entirely willing to do so. But if the customer’s accounts payable team requires the plant manager’s signature, the coordinator’s signature does not move the invoice. You need to ask which signature counts, not just who is available on the day.
Some factories specify the authorized signatory by name in the purchase order or contract. If the PO includes this, note it before mobilization. If it does not, ask directly.
What Does It Cost to Find Out Late?
Consider a project that takes ten working days to install. The crew finishes on a Friday. The handover document goes to the facilities coordinator the same day. The following Monday, the coordinator forwards it to the plant manager. The plant manager is traveling until the end of the month. Their assistant will look into it.
The document is finally signed three and a half weeks after the crew left site. Add time for your team to chase, and you are looking at a month from completion to invoice on a ten-day job.
The installation labour and materials were paid before the crew arrived. That completed work sits as cash tied up in a finished project that cannot bill until someone signs a document.
Now multiply that across a business doing six projects a month. If three of them follow this pattern, a meaningful portion of your finished work is waiting in someone’s inbox at any given time. The fix costs nothing in labour. It costs one extra question at the start of the project.
How to Build the Sign-Off Chain into Your Job Order
Before mobilization, capture four pieces of information as part of the job order:
- Full name and title of the authorized signatory for this specific site and project
- Their direct contact (phone or email), separate from the general site contact
- Whether they are typically on-site or off-site, and if off-site, when they are usually reachable
- A backup signatory: the name and title of the person with delegated authority to accept the handover if the primary is unavailable
Once you have this, confirm to the customer that a handover document will be required on or around the expected completion date, and that the named person will need to be available. Do this during the project kick-off conversation, not in the final week of installation.
This step does not need to be a long process. One email or one line in the kick-off call handles it: “Before we mobilize, we want to confirm who from your side will sign the handover acceptance. Can you give us their name and direct contact?”
Who Owns This Step?
If your team creates job orders before mobilization, this confirmation belongs in job order creation, not as a separate task that gets forgotten. A structured job order with a required signatory field makes it impossible to open a job without recording the name. Whoever fills in the job order has to find the answer before the crew leaves the yard.
Without a structured job order, this step falls through because nobody owns it. The foreman assumes the office knows. The office assumes the foreman confirmed it on-site. Nobody confirmed it.
FAQ
What if the customer contact says they are not sure who will sign?
This is a signal that the project has not been assigned internally at the customer’s side. Before mobilizing, request a brief call with someone senior enough to name the signatory. A project without a designated acceptance authority is a project with a built-in delay at handover. Do not mobilize until you have a name and a direct contact.
Can we get a provisional sign-off from someone lower in the chain and then get the correct signature later?
This sometimes works, but only if you have confirmed in advance that the customer’s accounts payable will accept a countersignature process. If you have not confirmed this, you may end up with a document that carries a signature but is not recognized by the right internal process. You are back to waiting.
Is one backup signatory enough?
For most factory projects, yes. For installations where the final acceptance requires a specific role (plant director, for example, because the project exceeded a budget threshold at the customer’s side), it is worth identifying a second backup. The point is not to collect names for its own sake but to ensure the handover does not stall because one person is traveling.
Field Operation System’s TRACE 30 builds a closing gate into every job order: a job cannot close without a customer-signed handover, and an unclosed job does not reach the billing queue. Part of what makes that gate work is knowing, before the crew leaves, who will sign. If you are running multiple projects a month and the signatory question is currently handled informally, start by adding it to your job order checklist. To see how the rest of the system fits around it, visit /program/ or book a 30-minute call.