Re: Dosimetry

[Bob Flood <bflood@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

At 12:59 PM 2/16/00 -0600, you wrote:
>
>I disagree with your overall assessment.  Bottom line - Pricing relies
>on income generated.  To suggest that software development, computer
>use, number of readers employed, personnel required for the service,
>etc. justifies an increase when moving from monthly to quarterly is in
>my opinion, bull.

I must not be making myself clear on this.

When you sent in your monthly badges, it took a certain number of staff at
the vendor's lab using a certain number of readers to get the badges
disassembled, checked, processed, calculations done, and the data reported
to you, all by some target deadline. When you send in quarterly badges,
unless you changed the number of people you badge, you're sending the same
number of dosimeters as you did when you processed monthly. It takes the
SAME number of vendor staff and the SAME number of readers to get the job
done in the time alloted as it did in the monthly schedule, and the vendor
can't lay off the staff or get money back on the readers in the intervening
months. To stay in business, the vendor HAS to generate pretty much the
same income from the smaller number of processing cycles to stay as it used
to under the larger number of cycles. In addition to having to carry the
labor and reader costs, the vendor also has to carry the computer and
software costs (not trivial, and the vendor's costs for these doesn't go
down if the customers uses fewer badges). About the only cost that goes
down for the vendor has to do with dosimeter inventory - that isn't usually
a particularly large part of the total operating budget to begin with, and
switching to quarterly, where the vendor had already made the investment to
have enough dosimeters on hand, essentially strands the vendor's investment
unless the vendor and generate new customers to offset the change.

Exactly how the pricing structure should change is up to each vendor and
I'm not advocating that any old pricing scheme is just fine. But most of a
dosimetry lab's costs are fixed, and unit pricing doesn't go up and down
like it does at Walmart. At a previous job the number of people badged was
reduced, and I was asked how much the dosimetry budget could be cut as a
result. That answer was zero, and I had a hard time defending that for a
while, but eventually prevailed.

>What's fair ?... a 52% increase as one RADSAFER reported to me...  OR
>...  a greater than 300% increase which I saw on my last statement. 

If I understand you correctly, the 300% increase means the bill for
quarterly badging would be as much as the sum of three monthly badging
cycles. That's what I mean by a vendor needing to generate the same income
each quarter whether it's from monthly or quarterly badging cycles. And the
one that will do quarterly for 50% more than monthly is probably counting
on gaining new business with the dosimeters it used to send to you. Just
like snowflakes, no two are alike.

Bob Flood
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
bflood@slac.stanford.edu
(650) 926-3793

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