Metrics & reporting
What is cost recovery?
Cost recovery is the practice of attributing the material and machine time consumed by each 3D print job back to the user, course, department, or customer responsible for it, so the operation's running costs can be recouped.
Also known as: chargeback, lab fees, cost allocation
What has to be true for it to work
Cost recovery is an accounting output of an operational record. It requires, per job:
- Material consumed, in grams or millilitres, at a known unit cost
- Machine time, at a known hourly rate covering depreciation and maintenance
- An attribution to the person, course, project, or cost centre that owns the job
- A completion state, so failed prints are handled by an explicit policy rather than an argument
The failed-print policy
Decide in advance who absorbs the cost of a failure, and publish it. Charging users for machine faults destroys trust in the system; absorbing every failure regardless of cause removes any incentive to submit printable geometry. Most working policies charge for failures attributable to the submitted model and absorb those attributable to the machine, which is only possible if failures are attributed at all.