Written by Scott Mulholland, Product Manager- Industrial Connections.

Much more flexible MOQs (minimum order quantities) and scalable pricing (sometimes also referred to as ‘column’ pricing) has now been applied to SAC configurable cables. They are generally configurable by specifying cable type/colour (e.g. Black PUR cable) and cable length other than our standard cable lengths (e.g. you could specify 2m for instance). These changes have been introduced to help our customers needing lower quantities of a cable for prototyping development, for instance.

The reason for the changes is to offer the customer more flexibility with regard to the amount of configurable cables that they have to order. Prior to these changes, it was the norm for an MOQ of 25 pieces to be stated to the customer. The MOQ of 25 reflected the extra work incurred by our production in stopping the machines to run off a small batch of customer specified cables.

You can now order 1 piece or more (so no more mandatory MOQ 25 pcs on configurable cables) but certain pricing conditions will be applied. Configurable (Variable) cables look like this in the catalogue:

The way this is going to work is like this. There will be three different levels for pricing in relation to 3 MOQ ‘bands’.

1-9 pieces
10-24 pieces
25 and over pieces

Here is an example of what you will now see on our website : (As an example I have configured this part as black  PUR cable with a length of 2m)

We can see that the MOQ defaults to 1 piece (price £12.87)  but the customer is notified that the best price is at the 25 pieces break point. And obviously, 1 piece falls into the 1-9 pieces pricing band.

If you choose a quantity that falls in the next pricing band, 10-24 pieces, you will achieve a better unit price.

There is a note on the order confirmation stating to the customer that a surcharge has been applied if the order is below the optimum MOQ (25 pieces).

As the yellow highlighted screen message states, though, the best pricing level is achieved at 25 pieces or above.

It is inevitable that there is a trade off between the number of pieces bought and the unit price that is paid, as in all walks of life really. However, we have endeavoured to make the pricing both fair and sensible so as not to penalise our customers who need flexibility in the cables that they specify and the amount of cables that they actually require.

If you have any questions relating to this matter please contact your local Phoenix Contact Sales Engineer or contact Scott Mulholland on 07908 583375 or email smulholland@phoenixcontact.com