Cost & Quoting

Cost Estimation and Quoting for Wood, Pulp, Paper, and Corrugated Products

A money-first breakdown of what drives cost per unit in wood, pulp, paper, and corrugated work, and how to quote it without leaving margin on the table.

Material is 55 to 75 percent of delivered cost in this category, so the quote lives or dies on the yield assumption behind it. If linerboard lands at 650 dollars per short ton and a box uses 1.4 square meters of C-flute board at 520 grams per square meter, the fiber content is 0.73 kg, but you must buy at the yielded rate, not the net rate. At 88 percent sheet utilization you actually consume 0.83 kg, so priced fiber cost is 0.83 x 0.65 = 0.54 dollars, not 0.47. Estimators who quote on net area instead of gross sheet routinely underprice by 8 to 12 percent.

Scrap is a cost multiplier, not a line item you tack on at the end. Every point of waste inflates material spend by roughly (1 / (1 minus waste)) minus 1. A converting line running 9 percent total scrap multiplies fiber cost by 1 / 0.91 = 1.099, adding 9.9 percent, not 9 percent, because you buy the wasted material at full price. Use the Corrugated Sheet Cost and Carton Blank Utilization calculators to set the utilization figure in writing, then price fiber at the grossed-up quantity so trim, setup sheets, and startup waste are all funded.

Machine time is priced per operating hour, and the number is bigger than crews expect. A corrugator or wide paper machine carries an all-in rate of 400 to 900 dollars per hour once you load depreciation, maintenance, and crew. At 250 dollars per minute of standing water, a 6 minute grade change or wet-end break costs 1,500 dollars in lost capacity. Quote against effective output from the Converting Throughput calculator, not nameplate speed. A job that only fills the machine to 70 percent of rated square meters per hour must absorb the same hourly rate over fewer units, raising cost per unit by 43 percent.

Labor cost per unit is a function of run length because setup is fixed. A 45 minute makeready on a die cutter at a 120 dollar per hour loaded crew rate costs 90 dollars regardless of quantity. Spread over 2,000 blanks that is 4.5 cents each; over 40,000 blanks it is 0.2 cents. This is why short runs need a minimum charge and why quoting a 1,500 piece order at the price-per-thousand of a 50,000 piece order loses money. Always separate one-time setup dollars from the per-piece variable rate on the quote sheet.

Energy is a real line, especially drying. The paper and dryer section can pull 1.2 to 1.6 tonnes of steam per tonne of product, and thermal drying runs 3 to 5 gigajoules per tonne of water removed. At natural gas near 8 dollars per gigajoule, removing 450 kg of water per tonne of sheet costs roughly 11 to 18 dollars per tonne in fuel alone. The Dryer Energy Cost and Moisture Loss calculators turn incoming and target moisture into a dollar figure, so a customer asking for a heavier, wetter grade sees the added drying cost instead of it vanishing into overhead.

Roll changes and moisture giveaway are the quiet margin leaks. The Roll Change Loss calculator shows that a splice forfeiting 90 seconds every 40 minutes on a 250 meter per minute line drops effective yield by about 3.6 percent, which at 650 dollars per ton is real money on every order. Moisture giveaway is worse: shipping paper at 8 percent when spec allows 6 percent means 2 percent of every ton billed as fiber is actually water you paid to buy and dry. On a 500 ton monthly run that is 10 tons of free water, roughly 6,500 dollars gone.

Overhead and freight round out the build-up and both scale with weight and bulk. Corrugated is voluminous, so a truck cubes out before it weighs out; a load capped at 1,800 finished boxes moves the same freight dollars whether the boxes are full or light, so cost per box swings with density. Allocate plant overhead as a percent of conversion cost, commonly 18 to 30 percent, not as a flat per-unit fee, or long light-weight runs get overcharged and heavy short runs get undercharged. State freight as a separate pass-through so a customer three hundred miles out does not distort the manufacturing quote.

A defensible quote stacks these transparently: grossed-up material at real utilization, setup dollars split from per-piece labor, machine time at the effective rate, energy from the actual moisture delta, scrap as a multiplier, then overhead and freight. Build it once in a template that pulls utilization from Carton Blank Utilization, sheet cost from Corrugated Sheet Cost, and drying from Dryer Energy Cost, and you can defend every number when a buyer pushes back. Quotes go wrong when any single fudge factor, usually a 5 percent scrap guess or nameplate speed, hides three separate losses that each deserved their own line.

Published 2026-07-01.