When a project comes back to you with nuisance tripping after a clean install, the settings are usually where it went wrong. Settings get decided in two places, on paper during engineering and in the field at commissioning, and a lot of engineering relationships cover the first and leave the second to chance.
Three ways engineering gets handled at startup
Documents delivered, engineer gone
What it is. The firm produces correct studies and settings, hands them over, and steps away before startup.
The trade-off. The cheapest arrangement and the most common one. Whatever happens when those settings are loaded into the equipment happens without the person who worked them out. A transposed pickup value or a misread coordination curve goes into service with nobody there to catch it.
Startup handled by whoever is on site
What it is. The crew or the equipment vendor enters settings from the documents, and the engineer is available by phone if something comes up.
The trade-off. Better than nothing, and it rests entirely on somebody realizing there is a question worth asking. The failures that matter here don't announce themselves. The system energizes, runs and looks fine, which is exactly the condition in which nobody picks up the phone.
Engineer present through commissioning
What it is. The engineer who developed the settings is on site, or reachable in real time, when those settings go live. They confirm values are entered correctly, verify the protection operates the way the coordination study says it should, and correct mismatches on the spot.
The trade-off. It adds engineering hours to the project, and it is the only arrangement that closes the gap between what was engineered and what ended up in the equipment. On most jobs that cost is a fraction of one return trip.
Why this one lands on you
When the settings get verified in the field, the equipment behaves from the first day, the client's first impression is a system that works, and the callbacks that would have traced back to a bad setting simply never happen. Your name is on that either way, whichever way it goes.
So when you are working out how engineering gets handled on a job, look past the deliverable. Ask who is going to be there at commissioning, and what happens when a setting has to be corrected on the spot.
A firm that treats commissioning as part of the work, instead of a document drop and a handshake, is the one whose projects stay finished.