In industry, price is not a fixed number; it is a curve. The cost of making one piece has nothing to do with the cost of making ten thousand. But where is the tipping point?
At Bimetall we work with the whole spectrum, from urgent unit spare parts to scheduled productions. I explain how we calculate costs so you can make better purchasing decisions.
The concept of “Setup Cost”
To understand the price, you have to understand this: before the machine cuts the first sliver of metal, we’ve already spent money.
- The engineer has programmed the CAM code.
- The operator has assembled the tools in the machine’s magazine.
- The clamps have been placed and the “zero piece” has been searched for.
This is the Setup . If you make 1 piece, you pay for the entire setup yourself. If you make 1,000 pieces, the setup cost is diluted to the point of being insignificant.
Short Series (10 – 200 units)
This is the comfort zone of many industrial SMEs. You need parts to assemble 50 machines this year.
- CNC advantage: You don’t pay for molds. If you had to make these parts by plastic injection or casting, the mold would cost you €10,000 or more. With CNC, the initial cost is zero.
- Disadvantage: Cycle time (the time it takes the machine to make each piece) has a direct impact on price.
Long Series (1,000+ units)
When we go into volume, we activate economies of scale. This is where automatic turning shines.
- Material purchase: We negotiate the price of steel or aluminum by the ton, not by the bar. This lowers the price of the raw material by 15-20%.
- Dedicated machines: We can block a machine to make just your piece for three weeks. This eliminates downtime for changing settings between different orders.
- Extreme optimization: In a short series, if we lose 10 seconds per piece, nothing happens. In a series of 10,000, 10 seconds is almost 28 machine hours lost. Therefore, fine-tune the process to the maximum.
The “Death Valley” of production
Sometimes, customers order intermediate quantities (for example, 2,000 plastic parts). It’s too much to machine one by one (it’s expensive) but too little to pay for an injection mold (it doesn’t pay off).
In these cases, at Bimetall we look for creative solutions: using commercial profiles that already have the approximate shape to reduce machining, or agreeing on partial monthly deliveries to manage it as continuous production.
Conclusion: What do I ask for?
If your project is live and can undergo design changes, stick with short series and CNC machining. Flexibility is worth money.
If the design is frozen and consumption is stable, ask us for a quote for a scheduled annual production . The unit price will surprise you.
