Assembly - November 2008 - (Page 41) ings later. Your proprietary information and significant product-specific experience aside, you don’t need to tell us how to design the project. But disclosing the details of the current processes, if any, may help to keep your price down on the new system. If you have any special requirements, we need to be aware of them at the start of our involvement. Control charts, automatic incoming parts inspection, special inprocess inspections, automatic statistical process control, extended qualification protocols, and many other special requirements have associated costs. We need to include these costs in our proposal to you. Finding out about these requirements later could cause project delays, whether for their execution or for the approval by your management of the concomitant additional funds. If there are any physical restrictions such as floor space, ceiling height, doorway size or building column location, we need to know what they are before we begin to generate our proposal. If, for example, we propose a U-shaped workcell for operator convenience, then learn that you only have a long narrow space available, we will need to requote the project, which may change the price, but will certainly delay the project. Please tell us the volume requirements for the product that passes through this equipment. If you have tentatively justified the project based on an hourly rate, tell us that. If you have only general, annual volume forecasts, we can work with that—and the available plant hours in your manufacturing year. In general, if you have specific Budgetary vs. Firm Proposal? requirements, tell us in your specification what they are. If not, or if you don’t know what the requirements should be, discuss the project with us, and we will help you determine the parameters of the equipment. Our Proposal Our proposal communicates to you our interpretation of your requirements, and describes how we will meet those requirements. We offer several types of proposals. Firm, budgetary, and phased are the mostused. A firm proposal is just that. Based on the scope described in our proposal, we will supply the equipment for the firm price we quote. During the execution of the project, any significant deviations from the original scope can result in price and/ or schedule changes. A budgetary proposal can be appropriate if one or more aspects of your project are not finalized. The decision tree in the sidebar entitled Budgetary vs. Firm Proposal will help you decide which you need. A budgetary proposal is nearly always sufficient for a break-even analysis to choose among production plans. Also, we can generate a budgetary proposal in a fraction of the time—and at a fraction of the cost—required to generate a firm proposal. So, even though we typically do not charge for proposals, please be considerate and don’t ask for a firm proposal when a budgetary proposal will work for your purpose. A budgetary proposal is almost always within 10 percent of what will eventually be the firm price—assuming there are no significant changes to the requirements. A phased proposal is a good way to approach a project for which you cannot develop a complete specification. It allows the two parties to share the risk, while mitigating the risk for both. Essentially, the project flow is concept, proof of concept, design, build, debug and qualify, and install. Each step— or phase—is addressed individually, and may change the direction for the www.assemblymag.com November 2008 / ASSE M B LY 41 http://www.assemblymag.com
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