On-Site or Bring It In? Laser Engraving Compared

Two quotes for marking your organisation's assets have come in. One supplier wants the items delivered to their workshop; the other says they will come to you. The second sounds more expensive. Often it is not, and the reason has nothing to do with engraving.

#The cost nobody puts on the quote

Marking 400 plastic chairs takes an afternoon. Moving 400 plastic chairs takes a lorry, two loaders, somebody to supervise the loading, somebody to check the count at the other end, and a fortnight of the chairs not being where they are supposed to be. None of that appears on the engraving quote, because none of it is the engraver's cost. It is yours.

The second bill: comparing the two quotes as though the only difference is the price per item. The workshop option has another bill attached to it, and you are the one who pays it.

This is why on-site asset tagging exists as a service at all. The machine is portable. The chairs are not.

#Where the line falls

From doing both, the crossover sits somewhere around 60 items, but the count is the least important part of it. (The published on-site rate itself falls with volume, from KSh 100 an item at 50 items to KSh 25 at 1,000 or more.) What decides it is usually one of these:

• Are the items fixed or awkward? Reception counters, built-in cabinets, machinery bolted to a floor, vehicles. These cannot come to a workshop at any price, so the question answers itself.
• Are they in use every day? A hotel cannot send its cutlery away for a week. A school cannot send its desks away in term time. The marking has to happen around the operation, at night or over a weekend.
• Is there an asset register to build at the same time? This is the one people underestimate. If each item is getting its own number, somebody has to walk the building writing down which number went on which desk in which room. Doing that while the marking happens is one job. Doing it afterwards is a second, worse job.
• Is it a handful of small items? Then bring them in. Sending an engraver across town for 11 keyholders is not thrift. It is waste; those go in the workshop queue with everything else.

#What an on-site day looks like

The engraver arrives with the machine, a power lead and a laptop. A test piece goes first (a spare chair, an offcut, one desk in the corner), because settings that are right for one batch of plastic are wrong for another, and your reception counter is not the place to find that out.

Then it is a production line. Items come in a stream, get their mark, and go back. On a good day with a clear run and someone from your side keeping the count, 400 chairs is comfortable. On a day where nobody knew we were coming and half the assets are locked in an office whose keyholder is on leave, it is not.

Which is the real warning: the constraint on an on-site day is almost never the machine. It is access, and access is your side of the job.

Two things make that side easy. Send one person who can open every door and who is not going to be pulled into a meeting at eleven. And decide the numbering scheme before the day, not during it. A sequence that starts over in each department is fine; a sequence that somebody invents at the third desk is not, and unpicking it afterwards means re-marking items that are already done.

The register is not a formality. In her audit of the year to June 2024, the Auditor-General flagged 26 ministries, departments and agencies for asset values with no proper register behind them, and the register expected under the PFM Regulations records each asset's name, tag number and location. The tag number engraved on the item is the half of that record that cannot go missing.

#Marking, tags, or both

Two different things get called asset tagging. A direct mark is cut into the item itself and cannot be removed without destroying the surface. An aluminium asset tag (KSh 50 a tag, from 100 pieces) is a separate engraved plate fixed on, which is what you want when the item's own surface will not take a mark, or when the tag has to be readable from a distance. Most real jobs use both, and deciding which goes where is worth ten minutes before anyone starts.

Assets that move, such as parcels, ballot boxes and deliveries, need something else again: engraved security seals (KSh 25 for a 30 cm seal, KSh 35 for 50 cm), which are meant to be broken, and to show it. The rates for all three are published, and if you are now wondering whether to own the machine instead of booking the service, the buyer's guide is the next thing to read.

Sources: The Star, Auditor-General finds 26 agencies with unsupported assets (news, June 2025) (read 14 Oct 2026).