Pricing

Hi all, first post here, please be gentle.

I have been working for a firm that builds machinery from scratch for the food industry. I have been writting the programs (mainly ABradley and mitsi fx). I recently saw quotes that the company had from other programmers. They price per HMI screen and I/O, I have always quoted on time taken. How does everyone else quote for a program build? Cheers KEV

I have done it three ways... T&M (time and materials), Time (best guess), break down of application, I have also been doing a few 'Not to Exceed'

The main point is as long as you are making a profit then you are doing good

One thing that I have also done just to compare was take on of there quotes and compare it to yours, were you real low? then up your price... if you are trying to build a relationship then you may just want to keep your prices low until they have trust in you

Thanks genious training, will take your words into consideration. We have always made a profit on our builds and the firm works really well as everything is done "in house" so the designers actually see the builders and programers actual see the finished item. The business has taken on a lot of new work this year and I am hoping to raise the program price but do not want to raise by too much so that we are not competative. So your words are very encouraging. Back to the drawing board now, do I charge what I think im worth (lol) and never get a job, or do I charge on a higher base rate. Cheers for the help. KEV

There was a thread on here about programming pricing

From memory it was
$ per digital IO
$ per analogue IO
$ per him screen x no of graphics on screen

Or similar

I can't find the thread now though

In today's Market if your making a profit I wouldn't put my prices up !

I saved it from long ago. Here it is:

0.5 hour per digital I/O point
1 hour per analog I/O point
2 hours per PID loop
4 hours per HMI screen

504bloke said:

There was a thread on here about programming pricing

From memory it was
$ per digital IO
$ per analogue IO
$ per him screen x no of graphics on screen

Or similar

I can't find the thread now though

In today's Market if your making a profit I wouldn't put my prices up !

Click to expand...

jcr said:

I saved it from long ago. Here it is:

0.5 hour per digital I/O point
1 hour per analog I/O point
2 hours per PID loop
4 hours per HMI screen

Click to expand...

Ahhh yes, thanks

I think id factor the 4 hours per HMI depending on number of custom graphics though, some screens can take a lot longer than four hours, whilst others could be 1 or 2 !

Brilliant, thanks for all the info. KEV

jcr said:

I saved it from long ago. Here it is:

0.5 hour per digital I/O point
1 hour per analog I/O point
2 hours per PID loop
4 hours per HMI screen

Click to expand...

Here's the thread where the above came from.

http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=26380&highlight=0.5+hour+digital+I/O+point

Be careful with pricing. I normally work on 'gut feel' and have rarely been wrong but did 11 screens recently for a 15" HMI and it took me 2 1/2 weeks!!
Have a lot of new graphics to cut and paste in the future though so it goes down to 'product developement'. I was more than covered in my quotation though and still made good money because 'gut feel' told me to stick plenty on the job. Onsite commissioning took 1 1/2 weeks instead of 3 days but that was also covered with 'gut feel'.
My next gut feel from scratch will mean much shorter HMI time for the next wack of jobs - evens out. I work for myself and do not have to justify profit/loss to a boss.
0.5 hours per digital seems a lot to me for example - I would normally allow five minutes - 10 minutes for analogue as well.
I think trying to generalise is nearly impossible - depends a lot on the application. Tuning very slow PIDs can take for ever - if the PID is fairly quick it takes a lot less time, normally, to tune. bThen there is always the exception.
For example to program a power station with automatic control one has to allow many weeks for commissioning as gear comes online.

Hello guys,

Happy 2011 to everyone.

Much depends on the application itself. The more 'intelligence' in the application, the less development time is reflected by IO-numbers.
In that case calculation get's more complicated, and that's where gut-feel (= experience) or down-to-the-bone analisys of the requirements comes in.
I've been doing applications with large IO-numbers and a pre-developed software-framework. In such a case development-time can be directly derived from the hardware.
On the other hand there are things like for example communication-issues which can consume a large amount of time (and not always a predictable amount of time).

With HMI, the same rules apply. One application(screen) only needs some simple visualization while another application could include a lot complicated stuff like data-processing.
Furthermore the tools used have huge influence. Some HMI-software is pretty basic, and therefor needing a lot of hocus-pocus programming to realize the features that you promissed the customer.

Greetz