How do you budget a deployment of a thousand tags?
By costing the labour before the tags. At a thousand units the tags are rarely the largest line in the project, installation is almost always underestimated, and the page or system behind them is frequently left out of the quote entirely.
Every line, in order of surprise
| Line | Usually in the quote? |
|---|---|
| The tags | Always |
| Writing and verifying each one | Sometimes |
| Installation labour | Rarely, and it is the largest |
| Access: ladders, permits, out of hours | Almost never |
| The page or system behind them | Rarely |
| Replacement over the deployment's life | Almost never |
| Documentation and handover | Almost never |
Labour is the big one
A thousand tags installed at even a few minutes each is a substantial number of hours, and installation is rarely a few minutes each.
Add travel between sites, waiting for access, cleaning surfaces, verifying after mounting, and recording what went where.
Then add the sites that cannot be done during trading hours, which is where the cost multiplies.
Measure it on the pilot rather than estimating. Time twenty real installations and multiply, including the ones that went wrong.
Cost it over three years
Tags fail, get covered, get painted over and get thrown away with the fixture they were on.
A deployment with no replacement budget quietly degrades, and nobody notices until a proportion of it is dead.
Budget a replacement rate from your own measured failures, not from a supplier figure, and include the labour of finding and replacing each one.
Include the recurring cost of whatever is behind the tags, since a subscription tied to tags in circulation is a cost for as long as they exist.
Comparing quotes
Put the lines above in a table and ask each supplier to fill it in. Missing lines are more informative than the prices.
Ask what happens if you stop paying, which separates a purchase from a dependency.
Ask whether the address is on your domain, since that determines whether the deployment survives a change of supplier.
And treat a quote that consists mainly of a tag price as incomplete rather than cheap. It is the same work, priced later.
Frequently asked questions
What is the largest cost in a rollout?
Installation labour, in almost every deployment. The tags are usually the smallest line in the whole project.
How do I estimate installation time?
Time twenty real installations during the pilot, including the ones that go wrong, and multiply. Estimates without measurement are consistently optimistic.
Should I budget for replacements?
Yes, from your own measured failure rate. A deployment with no replacement budget degrades silently.
Why compare over three years?
Because recurring costs and replacements dominate after the first year, and a first order comparison hides them.