Often times, the purchase price and the machine output are taken as primary investment decision parameters. Those are rightfully the first factors to consider, but often distract from considering other parameters which have a big impact on the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a machine. In many cases, businesses are better off gathering as much information as possible about the TCO to make an informed decision when investing in new machines.
Efficiency and total cost of ownership of new machines
The TCO for equipment within the egg grading business, for example, is composed of diverse factors. These include expected machine lifetime, error % (eggs lost in production), cleaning hours, maintenance cost, machine run time per shift, etc.
All those factors should be considered together with the initial purchase price to decide between suppliers with the full picture in mind.
The challenge of getting a good idea about the TCO of a machine is that some of the information is untransparent or non-existent. Case studies are required to document on these measures.
Many suppliers of equipment, including ourselves, reiterate how efficient their machinery is, however, many times the numbers to back it up have been lacking. Having a sufficient, factual basis to back this statement up is very important for decision-makers and producers to know what to expect.
Most of the time, businesses have to rely on the maximum efficiency stated by suppliers, which often depends on different factors and conditions of the production line. Therefore, this maximum efficiency can be very difficult for producers to achieve due to several factors which variate from one production line to the next.
To have a more reliable efficiency measure, using a comparable production site as indicator might be more helpful for accurate decision-making.
Case Study of SANOVO Graders
At SANOVO we have been at several of our Grading customers and asked for their collaboration in conducting case studies on their current running production with their SANOVO Graders.
We have received data from their production, and this allows our (potential) customers to get an insight into what would otherwise be first realized after making the investment and integrating the machine into their production.
Now we are able to provide new potential customers with efficiency data retrieved from similar production sites as their own to give a more accurate estimation of their future grading performance. An example: one common claim for SANOVO grading machines is their efficiency in regards to cleaning.
We are happy to see, through the study, that our development efforts in reducing cleaning time and reducing the need for manual cleaning are paying off. In our benchmarking studies on customer sites, SANOVO graders had a significant advantage over other grading machines when it comes to cleaning hours.
At SANOVO, we are focused on setting up customers for success in their production setup early on. Seeing this confirmed in our ongoing efficiency studies in live production environments at our customers’ production sites is what drives us to get better every day and encourages us to keep innovating.
This is of course to comply with our own ambitions to stay market leader in this segment, but also for advancing our customers and the egg industry in general.