Which Is Cheaper: Turnkey Coil Line or Split Purchase?

Where a Turnkey Price Actually Goes

A turnkey quotation bundles five things that a split purchase buys separately, and each one has a real cost behind it.

Engineering. Layout, foundation loads, electrical schematics and a strip pass line drawing run 120 to 200 hours. A split buyer pays for that work in change orders instead.

Interface ownership. One supplier owns the handshake between the line controller and the press, including the safety circuit and the die protection signals.

Freight consolidation. A turnkey shipment loads into 8 to 11 containers on one bill of lading, with one customs entry and one inland leg to the plant.

Commissioning. Two engineers for 9 to 12 days, with travel, visas and a single startup report signed by one party.

Spares. A shared kit covers bearings, seals, sensors and one spare drive, sized for the whole line rather than for three separate machines.

What the bundle also carries is margin. On a $300,000 cell that margin usually runs 6 to 11 percent, and it is the number a purchasing team is really negotiating.

The margin is not the whole story. A supplier who carries the interface also carries the risk of it, and that risk has a price whether or not it appears as a line item.

The Interface Bill a Split Purchase Hides

The machines in a split package are usually sound. What goes wrong sits between them, where no quotation has a row.

Electrical scope. One supplier ships a panel with a main breaker, the next expects a feed from the plant. The split point and the interconnecting cable get argued after delivery.

Protocol. A line controller speaking Profinet and a press running hard-wired relay logic need a gateway. Budget 40 to 80 engineering hours plus a week of testing.

Safety circuit. Two emergency stop chains have to become one dual-channel circuit at the same category. That work stays invisible until an auditor asks for the drawing.

Foundation and leveling. Three suppliers mean three datum references. A 0.5 mm step at the line joint shows up as a strip mark, not as a foundation error.

Freight and customs. Three shipments, three entries, three inland deliveries, and three chances for a container to sit in a port for a fortnight.

Commissioning visits. Each supplier sends people, invoices travel and leaves. The last one to arrive finds the line cannot run without the first one back on site.

The gap that costs most is not technical. When the line will not hold accuracy, two suppliers point at each other and the plant owns the problem until someone proves whose unit is drifting.

The last row is the one teams underestimate. Used iron is cheap until the drawings are missing and every bracket has to be measured on the floor.

A Worked Comparison on a 400-Tonne Cell

Numbers settle this faster than opinion. The cell: 1.2 mm by 400 mm SPCC, 5-tonne coils, 28 SPM, one progressive die.

The turnkey quotation came to $312,000 delivered, installed and commissioned, with a written line accuracy of ±0.05 mm at 28 SPM.

The split package priced the decoiler at $46,000, the straightener and feed unit at $88,000 and the press at $134,000, for $268,000 of iron.

Then the interface arrived: $29,000 for electrical, protocol, piping, leveling and the engineering hours nobody had quoted.

Freight added $8,500 across three shipments, a duplicated spares kit added $6,000, and three commissioning mobilizations added $11,000.

The split total landed at $322,500, or $10,500 above the turnkey price, before either route lost an hour of production.

Run the same arithmetic at 60 percent of the interface cost and the split wins by $9,000. That is the width of this decision.

Two identical cells change the answer again. The interface is paid once and the second cell inherits it, so the split route gains about $29,000 on the second unit.

Below roughly $120,000 of iron, the interface is a larger share of the total and the turnkey route wins almost every time.

Where the Comparison Stops Being Fair

Three things break the arithmetic, and each one has sunk a decision that looked clean on paper.

Scope drift. The turnkey figure may include operator training, a coil car and a two-year spares kit that the split package left out. Compare the scope sheets before the totals.

Performance guarantees. A turnkey supplier warrants speed and accuracy as a system. Split suppliers warrant their own unit, which leaves the seam guaranteed by nobody.

Currency and freight. A quotation held for 90 days in one currency and three shipments priced at sailing date are not the same offer, and the gap can exceed the decision margin.

In-house capacity. A plant with three maintenance engineers and a controls programmer absorbs interface work. A plant with one electrician cannot, and the schedule shows it.

Lock-in. A single supplier who owns the controls also owns the next upgrade. That is worth money in both directions, and it never appears in a comparison sheet.

What the sheet cannot price is startup risk. A line that starts three weeks late costs more than the $10,500 margin on most cells, and only one route concentrates that risk in one party.

Clauses That Matter on Either Route

Whichever route you take, five clauses decide who pays when the line does not run.

• Interface responsibility. Name in writing who owns the strip pass line drawing and the PLC handshake before the order, not during installation.
• One line acceptance test. Test at the plant's own strip and rated speed, with a single signature, so no unit can be accepted in isolation.
• Delay remedy tied to startup. A daily rate against the first-part date, because delivery is the easy date to hit and startup is the one that hurts.
• Drawings and parameter backup. Electrical schematics and the drive parameter file handed over at acceptance, not on request six months later.
• Retention. Ten percent held for 30 days after the acceptance test, on either route, so the last visit is not optional.

The acceptance clause separates the routes more than price does. A split package usually accepts each machine at its own factory, which proves nothing about the assembled line.

Write the test as a line test: 30 minutes at rated speed, 500 strokes, accuracy measured at the die and flatness measured at the exit.

Our own build sheets for a coil handling line treat that test as the last gate, because it is the only one the customer can repeat alone.

Before You Sign, Ask One Question

Ask every supplier to price the interface in writing, including the ones who say it is already included.

Ask for the strip pass line drawing before the order. A supplier who cannot produce one has engineered a machine, not a line.

FANTY has shipped lines into more than 60 countries, and the pattern repeats: plants that price the seam up front rarely argue about it later.

Whichever route wins, the decision is about who owns the seam. The machines are the easy part.