StirlingMachine
Aluminum
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2015
Hi folks. I'm a one man shop, business has been slowly growing with my skills and as word gets around. I bought a new machine this last year and am starting to go after larger jobs. In the past I was mostly doing one off complete builds of machines/tools or assemblies and prototype parts. Starting to move more into production oriented work now, but still doing some of the prototype odd job stuff. Never having worked in another shop, I don't have a good sense of common/best practice for job quoting when it comes to larger quantities. I've put together a pretty good spreadsheet that lets me amortize all my setup, CAM, and fixturing costs out for a bunch of quantities along with machine time.
But here's the real crux of the question. Do you reduce your rate for run time in exchange for quantity, or just let the costs amortize out and let the price lands where it does?
I think I have some work to do in how I calc my machine rate, for now I'm just using a basic hourly. And I'm sure something could be done there knowing that the machine will be running more and that effectively it's hourly rate will be reduced. But for the moment just using a base rate what I've been finding is that I get a steep drop in price up to say 100 (depending on complexity of setup, etc) parts, and then after that the changes are very slight as all the setup costs are a pretty small piece of the cost per part and it's just run time and material cost, which aren't changing much if at all. It seems like I've been seeing some surprise from customers that the price for 1000 parts isn't that different from the price for 500 parts. So in some cases I've been doing a 10% reduction in machine rate, or something along those lines to sweeten the deal. But it kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Anyhow, curious what the more experienced among you have to share. And thanks!
But here's the real crux of the question. Do you reduce your rate for run time in exchange for quantity, or just let the costs amortize out and let the price lands where it does?
I think I have some work to do in how I calc my machine rate, for now I'm just using a basic hourly. And I'm sure something could be done there knowing that the machine will be running more and that effectively it's hourly rate will be reduced. But for the moment just using a base rate what I've been finding is that I get a steep drop in price up to say 100 (depending on complexity of setup, etc) parts, and then after that the changes are very slight as all the setup costs are a pretty small piece of the cost per part and it's just run time and material cost, which aren't changing much if at all. It seems like I've been seeing some surprise from customers that the price for 1000 parts isn't that different from the price for 500 parts. So in some cases I've been doing a 10% reduction in machine rate, or something along those lines to sweeten the deal. But it kinda rubs me the wrong way.
Anyhow, curious what the more experienced among you have to share. And thanks!