Welding Tips and Tricks

Our company has a 7'x18' plasma table. We're still not entirely sure why we have it, but the boss man said he thought we needed one one day, and two months later, a truck pulled up unexpectedly to drop one off. I am not complaining, we like it, there are some uses for it in our shop, but after cutting out all the wall hangings etc we wanted, it mostly sits and looks impressive when sales reps and customers come by. Now, the boss man wants to make some money with it if he can. I had some programming training back in college so I was designated the "CNC plasma-thingy guy" by the boss man, so it has become my job to figure out how to charge for plasma cutting. The formula I have developed so far is this:
1. Figure out the setup and run-time, multiply by hourly desired rate the boss-man stated
2. Figure out how long it will take for our graphics person to generate the file, then for me to lay cut paths, array/nest parts, edit cut paths because graphics person doesn't understand what falls off when cutting, multiply by hourly rate.
3. Figure out how hard the cut is going to be on consumables. Big paths with few starts versus eight hundred small parts on a sheet.
4. Stare at ceiling and pretend I'm doing lots of calculations and smart things, spit out number that sounds good.
So far, my formula has worked rather flawlessly. Unfortunately, I have become a semi-boss man. Now, I am training other people in using the plasma table and spending more time involved with other projects. The boss-man has decided his sales reps should take over quoting plasma work and selling jobs which I am all for as I like to work with metal, not customers. After that, the boss-man asked for my formula for figuring pricing. He was not impressed.

Does anyone here run plasma tables doing this kind of work? If so, is there a hard-and-fast formula, or formula to finding a formula that would work? Do I just need to grab my salesmen, take them to the shop and spend a day or two going over the plasma, what it is, what it does, what costs us money to do? At the moment they want to price on "coolness" i.e. a custom sign or truck bracket with your name on it is expensive, while cutting 400 gussets a hour is not. This seems flawed based on my experience. Any good input would be appreciated.

I'll weigh in on this one. I've worked around plasma tables, though I've never been privy to the pricing.

My thoughts are:

Leave the one-off fancy stuff to the sign shops. While your machine is capable of remarkable finesse, at the end of the day it's a robot, and should make money doing what robots do best-- fast, accurate, repetitive work.

To do the fancy stuff, your pricing must be heavy on the artwork side. For mass production, the art and programming can be done nearly at-cost, and the money made at table time. Once the program is written, the client can call anytime and say, "I need 1000 widgets," and be slipped into the production schedule.

If a client needs 2000 gussets, and you price them to profit $2 each (a purely hypothetical example), your machine can make $4000 in one shift. OTOH, it's going to be one hell of a fancy sign to make that kind of money on a one-off, with valuable time consumed by your graphic arts and programming departments, and still a full shift of machine time (with the assocoated overhead--maintenance, consumables, power, and operator).

I'll be curious to know what formula you finally arrive at.

Steve

I think I got it figured out. Basically, we're treating the plasma as a shared asset. While we're a small construction company, we have a national footprint as we operate in a niche market, therefore we have a graphic designer that does advertising/phamplets/trade show stuff etc... That's where the push for us to do custom signage and whatnot comes from. Basically, all one-off pieces will be going through graphic design to bid artwork, then I bid the plasma on-time.

More mechanical or mass-produced items are priced directly by me. We finally decided that in an age of smart phones and cellular hotspots, I can generally be counted on to get back with a salesman with a plasma cut time estimate within a few hours so we'd just run things as they have, with the subtraction of me trying to guess artwork. I am going to give our sales reps a four hour "This is a plasma table and this is what it does" course so they can have a general idea what they are looking at when they're giving rough figures.

I'm with you 100% on the custom signage, Otto. I told our salespeople not to chase signage, as it usually has long detailed cutpaths and typically take re-work by the time they get to the customer. If we're bidding something else and a sign gets thrown in, fine, but I told them no knocking on doors and asking "Ever think of replacing that sign?" My main reason for this is simple: We are no good at selling stuff like that, our shop is not set up to do stuff like that, and I don't like doing stuff like that.

Here's our new official line for bidding this stuff:
1. Salesman talks to customer/customer calls in
2. I get email, or salesman comes back with rough sketch/numbers, I estimate time and whether graphics design needs to be involved, then:
A. Graphics design bids time sperately
B. Salesman runs with my price
3. We sale the job
4. Profit

I am also working on a formula now with plasma starts/inches cut to give us a more accurate picture of on-time. We were using the program runtime and adding 30% for starts, but were ending up either way way high on time or way way low on detailed pieces. I also like your example, I spent today pricing 2000 gussets!

It sounds like you have a good handle on it, now.

You said you serve a niche market... May I ask what niche? I work in a quite small specialized industry myself. I repair, rebuild, and recertify liquid hydrogen tanker-trailers, so it's "almost rocket science".

Steve

Fire/Rescue trainers. Lotsa travel. Mostly our shop does rails/stairs for training towers. We do do some of the confined space/rappel props and whatnot.

That's great!

It's nice to know that what you do makes a real difference. I spent some time in my career building ambulances, which felt much better then when I built boat docks.

Steve

It's a good industry. Meet some great guys in the field, and most importantly the customer really appreciates what you do for them. Get into some interesting things now and again, and of course watching the fire props fire off is always exciting.