Lamination Cost and Pricing....

[KeithMan]

I wanted to share our cost and pricing for lamination and see if everyone else thought it looked reasonable. We are a commercial printer that does large format work for a couple clients and recently bought a laminator, so we are having to setup pricing. We bought a new 55" roll to roll laminator. Our cost and pricing is setup as follows:

COST for operator, machine and overhead is $40/hr
COST for Standard UV Laminate $0.31 sq/ft

PRICE Every Job is get a setup charge of 10 minutes time and $5 material to cover material changes, warmup times, carrying stuff back and forth to the laminator.
PRICE is figured by taking the estimated run speed of 80 linear feet per hour and the cost of $40/hr and marking it up 60% to $64/hr. For larger jobs there is a sliding scale that increases the hourly throughput up to 150 linear feet per hour.

I would love to hear how this compares to others.

 

[unclebun]

It's fine that you have figured it in such detail, but I think you'll have a hard time working that pricing with a customer. Just simplify it to how much per square foot does lamination add.

 

[Gino]

Do you have your overhead figured in ?? Insurance(s) ?? What about waste ??

You sound way too cheap. And like mentioned, don't itemize it for your customer, just give them an end cost totally. We usually price it with a printed cost and a lamination cost and recommend laminating almost everything.

 

[Notarealsignguy]

Do you have your overhead figured in ?? Insurance(s) ?? What about waste ??

You sound way too cheap. And like mentioned, don't itemize it for your customer, just give them an end cost totally. We usually price it with a printed cost and a lamination cost and recommend laminating almost everything.

80 linear feet an hour will make up for being cheap. That should be 15 mins with setup and all.

 

[netsol]

Do you have your overhead figured in ?? Insurance(s) ?? What about waste ??

You sound way too cheap. And like mentioned, don't itemize it for your customer, just give them an end cost totally. We usually price it with a printed cost and a lamination cost and recommend laminating almost everything.

Gino,
if ilive to be 100 i will never know what you know about the sign business (25 years as a computer consultant. 15 yrs in commercial video repair/engineering)

HOWEVER


on this one i have to protest

unless the laminator has a big mahogany crank, or a dead mans switch i question if this employee is tied to that ROLL TO ROLL lamination job

if i were. the customer, i would question why i was not beng charged a fraction of the hourly rate (paying for the % of employee I actually use)

we used to do data recovery. often nothing more than mounting the hard drive on a server in our office, starting a VERY EXPENSIVE piece of software & letting it chug along for a day or two, until it finished.

a guy who was my best tech, could never understand why he wsn't entitled to 80 hours of overtime, for the time he spent at home,after starting the recovery, waiting for it to finish.

 

[netsol]

perhaps my opinion willchange now that the sign business will be my only income...

 

[Jester1167]

Don't forget to set a minimum for every process/product in your shop and always assume you have the wrong laminate loaded. In my mind, those are big profit leaks.

I don't print anymore but when I did, everything got laminated, so it was included in our pricing. If you don't have pricing software, you can create Excel spreadsheets and put them on the server so everyone has access. The beauty of them is that you can make them simple to update when your raw material prices increase, set waste factors, change labor rates and profit margins and output retail and wholesale pricing.

I had mine set up with dropdown lists for material selection, and area to figure square feet (you could use linear as well). There are no limits to Excel if you willing to learn.

I have attached a few Excel files others may find helpful. The wrap pricing hasn't been updated in about 6 years but I use the installation and travel all the time.

 

[iPrintStuff]

We pretty much laminate everything as standard but have a sqm price for lam and no lam.

Honestly we don’t add that much extra for laminate because the vinyl price is already pretty high. We also have two laminators (one for standard lam and one for the good stuff) which makes my life a lot easier. Can also laminate a full roll of vinyl in 5 mins on the newer of the two so that also helps lol.

It’s been a while since we looked at the pricing (but we have changed suppliers since and the new one is cheaper anyway) but as others have said we priced it assuming we’d have to unload and reload a roll for every new job.

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

Gino,
if ilive to be 100 i will never know what you know about the sign business (25 years as a computer consultant. 15 yrs in commercial video repair/engineering)

HOWEVER


on this one i have to protest

unless the laminator has a big mahogany crank, or a dead mans switch i question if this employee is tied to that ROLL TO ROLL lamination job

if i were. the customer, i would question why i was not beng charged a fraction of the hourly rate (paying for the % of employee I actually use)

we used to do data recovery. often nothing more than mounting the hard drive on a server in our office, starting a VERY EXPENSIVE piece of software & letting it chug along for a day or two, until it finished.

a guy who was my best tech, could never understand why he wsn't entitled to 80 hours of overtime, for the time he spent at home,after starting the recovery, waiting for it to finish.

You gave me a flashback to my time in IT... using Rstudio to recover bad hard drives that would run all day but I would be doing something else. Sometimes it would take me another whole day going through all the scattered and orphaned files it found trying to make sense of it...sometimes the drive would die halfway into the recovery. Gezz I hated that part of the job.

 

[netsol]

yes, 10,000 files recovered in 9,998 folders & then you had to make sense of it

 

[Texas_Signmaker]

yes, 10,000 files recovered in 9,998 folders & then you had to make sense of it

all of it to save someones photos... i've seen some interesting ones over the years.

 

[Baz]

The more detailed your pricing is, the more arguments you are setting yourself up with.
I've got a set square foot price for unlaminated and laminated prints.
I don't break down each production process to do a job.
I just estimate the amount of time i will spend doing the whole thing. That may vary wildly depending on the job.
Printing/laminating a 4'x8' and sticking it to a board is allot faster than Printing/laminating/Cutting/Weeding/Premasking a 4'x8' size of mutliple stickers.

I have allot less arguing and haggling on prices when i just give my customer one number to look at.

 

[KeithMan]

The customer just sees a total for the lamination, none of the detail. I pulled all of these numbers out of our estimating software so everyone could see how I was arriving at the cost. We run a lot of retractable banners that are setup and never retracted and are then the banner is replaced every few months. So far we haven't been laminating these. They also print on both sides of the vinyl.

We also do a lot of vinyl mounted front and back on gatorboard. We currently have pricing set where just one 22x28 poster is $80, which seems high. With lamination it would be around $100. Our prices include $20 for packaging and hand delivery to the customer.

 

[TopFliteGraphics]

I have a question about pricing by square foot.

For the sake of round numbers, if you have a 54" printer like I do and a job comes in that is that is 60" by 12". That equals 5 sq ft. If you cost the job by using a simple square foot calculation of $1.50/sq ft. It shows that your cost is $7.50.

However, given that you will have a lot of waste on it and you are actually going to consume more than 6 linear feet of material, shouldn't you be using linear feet for a measurement instead of square feet? at $1.50 per sq ft a 675 square foot roll ends up with a cost factor of $1,012.50. Using that number per linear feet of actual usage, your cost will equal $43.88 (assuming you actual consume about 6.5 linear feet of material since you are laminating it and there needs to be a head and a tail on the material to run it through the laminator) since you will be using 6.5 linear feet times a cost factor of $6.75 per linear foot. That is a tremendous difference in my book and isn't it actually a more accurate cost method?

 

[Notarealsignguy]

I have a question about pricing by square foot.

For the sake of round numbers, if you have a 54" printer like I do and a job comes in that is that is 60" by 12". That equals 5 sq ft. If you cost the job by using a simple square foot calculation of $1.50/sq ft. It shows that your cost is $7.50.

However, given that you will have a lot of waste on it and you are actually going to consume more than 6 linear feet of material, shouldn't you be using linear feet for a measurement instead of square feet? at $1.50 per sq ft a 675 square foot roll ends up with a cost factor of $1,012.50. Using that number per linear feet of actual usage, your cost will equal $43.88 (assuming you actual consume about 6.5 linear feet of material since you are laminating it and there needs to be a head and a tail on the material to run it through the laminator) since you will be using 6.5 linear feet times a cost factor of $6.75 per linear foot. That is a tremendous difference in my book and isn't it actually a more accurate cost method?

I price the sq ft based on material used including the waste which is the same as linear feet. Same goes for substrates.

 

[KeithMan]

We price by square foot on the printer and linear feet on the laminator. When we have extra material needed, we just type that into our estimating software.

 

[ColorCrest]

However, given that you will have a lot of waste on it and you are actually going to consume more than 6 linear feet of material, shouldn't you be using linear feet for a measurement instead of square feet?

Yes, however there is another factor which is "market pricing" which you might need to meet.

In your example it will be someone's job to fill the void left on the media with production work to make best use of the process in order to actually be profitable. Using your particular example again, a 64" machine could be efficient or a more narrow size of media roll on your existing 54" machine.

 

[ColorCrest]

We price by square foot on the printer and linear feet on the laminator. When we have extra material needed, we just type that into our estimating software.

When you do that, does the calculation meet market price and, if so, what software does that?

 

[KeithMan]

We use Printer's Plan to do estimating, tracking and scheduling.

We aren't sure what market price is. I generally figure our costs, then mark up the materials and labor 50 percent. I then check what other online shops are charging and try not to be much higher than they are. Oddly enough, some items seem to have a lot more room for markup compared to others that are similar. There seems to be minimal markup for posters on foam board, but lots of room for markup on window graphics.

 

[ikarasu]

If someone wanted a 12"x12" Decal... would you run just the 12" decal and charge the customer for 5 sqft of material?

Generally it's not the only job you're running, or at least it shouldn't be. If it's a specialty job where we're bringing the media in just for the job, then yes...we charge by the linear foot. But if it's our typical media...we always have stuff off to the side. We factor in a sqft cost...then when we're doing a job, we add a wastage percent - One customer ALWAYS orders 31" signs... and the only size media we can use for the job is 48". so we charge by the linear foot for that job - a one size solution doesn't fit every situation.


We generally have 30, 48, 54, and 60" on our most common used medias - We generally run each media when theres 10 or so different orders...We'll rip everything, tell onyx its 30", 48". 54", etc and see what has the least wastage and run it on that. Some stuff like kiosk wraps have a ton of wastage... We throw some cheaper decals (Free upgrade for the customer), or address labels or promotional stickers on the side of any big sections of waste we have.