How to calculate material and time used to get exact cost?

[n0stra]

We have a sign company that has everything from neon to led sign making. We have welding, painting, cnc router, vinyl, etc.

The question and something that is quite time consuming one the one guy doing it at the moment is the work with making sales quotes for possible customers.

We know the cost of materials and the time used when we know the length of the sides of letters in a sign for instance, but the question is how we can make this part more effective.

What tip can you give us? About software for instance?

Btw, sorry about my english. Were norwegian and this is a second language to me so

 

[n0stra]

Let me rephrase that a bit, i know my hourly cost and we know the material cost, i just need a way or a tool to help us do the math in a more effective and exact way. At the moment the manager is using a neon tool of some kind to cound the lenght of the sides and such and adding up manually to the material cost and so on.

 

[G-Artist]

There are several estimating software packages for sign shops out there.

If you are going to any of the shows I am sure you sill see those guys and they usually have a continuous movie going.

The sign mags also rate them every few years.

 

[n0stra]

With a large and long country consisting of only 4,5 million inhabitants and high traveling costs its not so often that you see something like tradeshows for our kind of work around here. I guess we have to go abroad for something like that.

I will try to take a look into the magazine you mentioned, if its possible to get it sent to Norway that is. To bad you will have to wait perhaps 12 months for this article though

I guess the dream tool would be something where you could take a vector file or a picture of a logo, insert it and decide the with and height of the finished sign, deciding how deep it will be, the material (for instance aluminium) and the thickness of the material and then get the total amount of aluminium you need. Also the amount of LED's inside and hence getting a big help in deciding the total cost and also how many hours of work it will take. We use a CNC for the fronts but the sides of letters etc has to be made into shape and welded by our workers.

 

[letterman7]

When you design your projects, don't you already know how big it will be? Calculating material usage comes with the territory and experience. As you build your projects, you should be keeping a table on how much material was used, how much was wasted and how much time it took. If you aren't doing that, you're cheating yourself. Measuring for returns on channel letters isn't rocket science if you have a scale (or full size) drawing.

 

[Kevin-shopVOX]

Try using Estimate...it works for us on calculating a price based on costs/markup plus additional profit and markup on your overhead burden rate.

 

[n0stra]

When you design your projects, don't you already know how big it will be? Calculating material usage comes with the territory and experience. As you build your projects, you should be keeping a table on how much material was used, how much was wasted and how much time it took. If you aren't doing that, you're cheating yourself. Measuring for returns on channel letters isn't rocket science if you have a scale (or full size) drawing.

The most expensive asset in Norway is work hours, and the guys working the welding, cnc machine etc dont have a clue on economics and dont want to handle sales. The manager is currently the only one handling price quotes.

When someone asks for a price quote you often just get a logo and some idea on what they are looking for. Lets say, 8 letters, 4 meters wide with led inside and light coming out the back. You dont want to use more time than necessary when giving a price quote, and the market doesnt allow you to add an extra buffer either so you have to be quite precise. And the laws gouverning purchases are extremely hard in norway so you cant just adjust the bill during the making of it either. So when you have given a price you have to stick with it, and if you made a calculation 10 percent off that can make a huge difference.

We have to measure up every inch, especially the sides are difficult since they aint exactly flat/linear. Most signs we make are 3d lettering with lights inside. And you use alot more material on the sides than you use on the front and rear alot of the times, especially with norwegian letters.

I guess i was just hoping for something to measure the length of the outline in an automatic way based on vector drawings and with a given lenght and with. If we knew that the lenght of the outline would be 12 meters we can estimate the work needed for welding, sanding and paint

 

[vid]

I'm not sure if this offers more than your existing software, but check out CADtools. There's a menu called CADTracker that will measure the perimeter and area of a vector image.

It's an Illustrator plug-in. ...and not that I know anything about advanced Illustrator features, but I think that one could build a custom spreadsheet within the file as a template (AIT) --- Drop your vector image into the template, measure the vectors, and enter the data in the spreadsheet for your calculations?... maybe?

It could be worth an email to the vendor to see if it will work for you.

 

[TrustMoore_TN]

I'm not sure what your sales volume is, but if you are doing 500K (US Dollars) or higher, I would take a look at Cyrious. I've used their system in several companies and we will be bringing them in at the company I work for this summer. Its an extremely comprehensive system though. Its not just an estimating package. You can run the entire business from it. Take a look at it online and email Dean Sharp (dsharp@cyrious.com) and he'll be able to give you more information about it.

In my opinion its the best system out there, but I will tell you upfront that its expensive. The way I was able to justify the price to my boss was to look at it like this... If I can close more sales because I can quickly and accurately quote jobs, then I have more than paid for the software in the first year. Our close ratio for our customers is about 30%. If I can close 30-40% more of those sales then its a good investment.

You'll read reviews of the software online where some people hate it, and some love it. It really boils down to doing the work in the beginning when you set it up, to be able accurately quote jobs. No software can do everything. So many people expect to open the software box and immediately begin estimating. Its not that simple. Since there are many variables to estimate any job, those variables have to be setup. Then you have to determine if you are going to have the system price jobs by the square foot, linear foot, set price, or if you are going to use a cost-up model.

The mistake I see happen very often is that a sign shop owner doesn't take the time commitment that it takes to setup the software in the first place, and they are left with a useless piece of software that they paid several thousand dollars for. Its going to take alot of time to set up. Realize that upfront.

The other thing I see is that owners don't really trust the software to do the pricing for them since they have been doing it manually for so long. I was a regional director for one of the sign franchises here in the US and we would run reports for the owner to analyze the business. One of the most revealing things was that the percentage of price-overrides was many times 70-85%. A certain amount of overrides is normal, but I wouldn't want that to be more than 20% for my shop. A system that is setup correctly to begin with will save you time and make you money. Period.

Some of the other software out there is Activity, Estimate, Casper, CRC, Sign-Tracker and some other names. Everyone has their favorite. Do your homework going into this. Determine EXACTLY what you want the software to do, and how you want it to do it. Do a comparison of the top 3-4 companies you are looking at, and see what is going to work best for you based on what you want from the software and what they can offer.

Another tip... Don't take anyones word that a software package can do something. Make them show you. Write a list of questions and features you want to see and make them go through them all with you. What you will find is that you have to give up some features to gain others, or that there isn't a software out there that will do what you are wanting. But at least you'll know that going into the purchasing decision.

Sorry for the long winded speech, but its something I can speak with some authority on. Just my opinion. Hope it helps!

 

[J Hill Designs]

omega will give the perimeter distance of vector objects as well...

 

[n0stra]

Thanks for all the comprehensive answers and suggestions and especially the answer given by BluemoonATL, i really appreciate it.

Luckily my manager is a guy that appreciates and understands the possibilites of computers and software even though he is one of the "old timers" in the business. Ive given him some of the suggestions from you guys and were allready looking through features and contacting companies asking about what we need and the possibility to have a trial version, he seems really exited about being able to make this part of the job more effective, a part that often is boring, time consuming and takes away alot of his time.

Again, thanks alot.

 

[GAC05]

One more option to check:
http://www.rhino3d.com/
This program will do easily what you are asking - the total length of boundary curves from a vector drawing.
Plus a great deal more that could be useful for the type of work you do.
It is $1000.00 US
They have a fully functional demo that you can download to see if it meets your needs


wayne k
guam usa