If you think hiring an expert is expensive....

Just wait until you hire an amateur.

We’ve just priced up a job for a major national company who need to check raw materials arriving at their factory. They’re not claiming that their suppliers are defrauding them but they just want to make sure that what is on the invoice s what actually arrives.

The site presents some challenges, slopes, a two way road, remote printing location amongst others, so to do it correctly means the investment in the project overall will be substantial.

But at the end of it, the system will be highly accurate and provide the customer with the information he needs for many years. We maintain some systems which are nearly 40 years old and still going strong for instance.

There are though, plenty out there who will do the job on the cheap. Poorly designed, badly installed and not really up to the job and, in just about every case, considerably cheaper.

A recent enquiry came from a customer who had just been quoted £4,500.00 to replace all the load cells and mountings on his axle weighbridge only four years after he had previously had them all replaced at a similar cost.

Bluntly he’d been persuaded to buy a cheap system which wasn’t really up to the job and unless he invested in a more hard wearing installation he was going to be spending that £4,500.00 every few years for ever.

So that initial investment turned out not to be as cheap as he thought.

Shouldn't that weighbridge cable be in a duct underground??

Not only that, we’ve seen some very sub-standard and in some cases downright dangerous installations as per the photograph.

Unsurprisingly, this is an issue that some of our customers find as well. One provides specialist excavating services and designs and builds a lot of his own equipment. He has similar tales to tell of companies  who make all manner of claims as to what they can achieve at a fraction of the price of the experts.

We all want to pay as little as possible for the equipment and services we buy and driving a hard bargain is something we all do. It’s something we expect our customers to do. But there’s a difference between negotiating a fair price for all and being blinkered to what the experts are saying because someone else has offered a considerably cheaper price.

Some people are blinded by the price and never question why a complex installation is so much cheaper from someone else. There is always a reason for it.

Many of our staff have been involved in axle weighing for over 30 years and in that time we’ve learnt an awful lot about the subject. We look at each application closely and work closely with our clients to make sure we fully understand what information the require and where and how it is going to be used.

Only by doing that and specifying the right system for the job including all the items that are essential for it to work will it do what the client wants and have a long life.

There are though, much cheaper ways of doing it if that’s what you want!