Thermal spray shipping costs

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Thermal spray companies everywhere are facing increasing competition nowadays. The recent downturn in the global economic conditions has put in undue stress on all businesses and thermal spray facilities are no exception. In order to maintain a significant competitive edge, it is imperative that you hold on to a strong control on all of your costs, failing which the bottom line of your thermal spray business will start seeing a downward trend. In keeping with the trend of thoughts in the last few posts, we will address in this post the issue of thermal spray shipping costs.

Thermal spray shipping departments are seldom looked at seriously by companies as a cost center. All said and done, once thermal spray coatings processing has been performed, after all the numerous costs have already been incorporated into the hardware, getting the parts over to your customer is the last step in processing prior to billing. The costs involved in shipping obviously need to start with the labor costs of your shipping department and companies usually have a good handle on this aspect. The next item to concentrate on is the cost of shipping supplies that might include boxes, bubble packing materials, heavy wadding, shipping and strapping tapes and banding. Because thermal spray coatings are fragile and chipping and other damage to the thermal sprayed coatings are not acceptable, extensive care needs to be exercised in the packing and shipping process. Many thermal spray shipping departments use foam in place packing methods and this can get to be quite expensive too. Negotiating costs with the shipping supplies vendor is a cardinal must for every thermal spray company. Also, adding the cost of shipping must be a definite line item addition when quoting jobs and or in the billing cycle. Because someone needs to pay for all this shipping material and most often it is your customer that needs to pick up the tab.

Another key area in shipping that one needs to avoid overlooking is the cost of the shipping carrier. Carefully choosing freight carriers is extremely important, unless your customer insists on using a specific freight carrier, in which case he needs to pick up the costs completely. If you are paying for shipping, then negotiate discounts. Another case in point is that you do not need to stick with one carrier for all your shipping needs. It might be cheaper to use a string of carriers for various customers, such as by zone of shipping, domestic, international, by shipping weight, shipments by air or ground and so on.

Insurance levels for your shipments in another area to be looked into when it comes to shipping your thermal spray coated parts. Companies blindly use the insurance provided by their freight carriers. This does not always end up being the most cost effective alternative. There are many third party insurance companies available that will insure your freight for much lower costs sometimes and you need to pay careful attention to these insurance costs. Thus thermal spray shipping costs can add up to be quite a bit and there is no need to be ignorant about these expenses.