Who it's for
You quote weldments where fit-up and arc time set the price, not the steel. What runs in the browser today is the handrail and stair configurator — tonnage, fit-up hours, weld metres, coating area, a should-cost curve — plus routing that prices the coating you send out, on a ledger where every line names its rule.
Is this you?
You fabricate in steel — handrails, balustrades and stair runs, plate weldments, structural assemblies somebody else detailed and you have to price. An estimator pulls tonnage off the BOM, adds connection hours by feel, works the coating off area, and most of a day is gone on one quote. Read the boundary first, because it decides whether this page is for you today: the fabrication should-cost that runs in the app is a parametric handrail and stair configurator, where you set height, run and post spacing and it prices the run. There is no file-upload path into it — you cannot hand it a detailing BOM or a 3D weldment and get a member takeoff back, and nothing in the suite reads joints off a steel model for you. If architectural metalwork is a real part of your book, the fastest thing here is already live. If it isn't, the fabrication takeoff itself is not yours yet, and what is — routing with the sent-out steps priced, an itemized ledger, a costed BOM off a multi-body model — is worth reading on its own terms rather than as a stand-in for it.
A typical day
Tonnage off the BOM, connection hours by feel, weld metres counted twice because nobody trusts the first pass, coating worked off area. Every estimator does it a little differently, and the shop that answered first has already sent a number.
Fit-up and arc-on time are what actually set the price on a weldment, and neither one shows up on the estimate as its own line. The joint's process, its deposition rate, and the wire and gas it burns get carried as a flat uplift on the steel.
You know the coater's markup. The days the job sits in their yard, plus the truck out and the truck back, live in somebody's head and quietly fall off the lead time you promised.
Consequence class, service category, production category — settled properly once the job is won, by which point the inspection and the paperwork they imply were never in the number. BS EN 1090 becomes a cost you absorb instead of one you quoted.
What changes
The fabrication should-cost that runs in the app today is a parametric handrail and stair configurator. Set the geometry, and tonnage, fit-up hours, weld metres and coating area come back automatically, with a should-cost curve across quantity breaks instead of one flat per-piece figure. Every route closes with an inspection line, and the floor traveler carries BS EN 1090 execution-class context worked out from consequence, service and production category — advisory context, not a certification.
On a handrail or stair run, each joint is matched to a weld process — SMAW, GMAW, FCAW, SAW or GTAW — with deposition time, duty cycle, and the wire, gas and flux costed alongside it. Fit-up time and arc-on time land as separate ledger lines at your own labor and burden rates, so weld stops being a percentage somebody adds at the end and starts being a figure you can argue with.
Drop a multi-body STEP, 3MF or STL of a fabricated assembly and it rolls up into one costed BOM — the cheapest feasible route for each part, tooling counted once across the job, a critical-path lead time, and a coarse geometric screen for parts that overlap or sit closer than they should. Read it for exactly what it is: per-part cost and route. The weld takeoff is not read off that model, and no joints are found in it.
Finishing is a route step like any other: galvanizing, blasting and coating get marked in-house or priced at the markup your shop has already accepted for that vendor, with the handling and queue time between departments built into the route rather than remembered. Candidate routes come back ranked cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps, so sending work out is a call you price instead of a call you make on the phone.
No opaque totals. Each cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting, or a rule in the engine, and every result carries a confidence value that states its basis — a published prior, your own calibrated actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that a human needs to look at it. When a customer asks why the fit-up hours are what they are, the answer is already on the ledger.
Where to start
Every day an RFQ sits unanswered is a day closer to landing on a faster shop's desk. Upload the model and get a ranked manufacturing route back; send the drawing alone and get its tolerances and GD&T read out while you chase the model, rather than losing the day waiting on it.
When one senior estimator has to touch every RFQ, the queue is the bid you lose. Put the shop's machine rates, labor rates and cost model in one place every quote pulls from, get the route built instead of rebuilding the takeoff, and have the shop-floor card that answers the job already open when it lands.
Manufacturability feedback that arrives after release is a change order, not a review. Partimation returns findings on every upload, before a process has been chosen, and runs a real removal simulation against the tooling you actually run to show exactly which stock a cutter cannot reach.
Whether a step runs on your own machines or goes to a vendor is usually judgment and a phone call. Partimation builds the full route — tooling, forming, heat treatment, machining, finishing and the transfers between departments — and prices each step in-house or at your accepted vendor's markup, with the queue days.
Plenty of RFQs arrive as a scanned print with no CAD model behind them. Partimation reads dimensions, tolerances and GD&T straight off the sheet, scores the confidence of every value, and cross-checks the print against the model on holes, envelope and GD&T-to-face when one finally turns up.
A customer's fabrication package arrives as one multi-body STEP. Per-part manufacturability findings, a six-family process screen with the constraint behind each verdict, and a coarse clearance screen come back before you price it. Nothing joint-level does: no member schedule, no weld metres, no joints off the model.
The machined parts inside a steel job are where make-or-buy actually gets decided. Each route step comes back marked in-house or priced at your accepted vendor's markup with the queue days it adds, and the in-house side is checked against a real removal simulation rather than a memory of the last one.
Architectural metalwork is the fabrication work somebody other than the chief estimator can price today: a browser configurator takes height, run and post spacing and returns tonnage, fit-up hours, weld metres, coating area, a should-cost curve and an execution-class traveler. Structural one-offs still wait on him.
FAQ
Handrail and stair runs, through a parametric configurator — you set height, run and post spacing rather than uploading a file, and tonnage, fit-up hours, weld metres and coating area come back with a should-cost curve across quantity breaks. Feeding a detailing BOM or a 3D weldment in to get a member takeoff is not a path the app offers today, so a one-off structural job is better brought to a walkthrough than to the configurator.
Fit-up and arc-on time are the hours that set a weldment's price, and most estimates carry them as an uplift on the steel because nobody costs the joint itself. On a handrail or stair run, each joint is matched to a weld process — SMAW, GMAW, FCAW, SAW or GTAW — with deposition time, duty cycle and consumables priced, and fit-up and arc-on land as their own ledger lines at your own labor and burden rates.
Galvanizing, blasting and coating are finishing steps on the route like any other. Each one is marked in-house or priced at the markup your shop has already accepted for that vendor, and the handling and queue time between departments is built into the route rather than remembered. Routes come back ranked cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps, so the schedule cost of sending work out is visible before the date is promised.
A costed BOM roll-up: the cheapest feasible route for each part, tooling counted once across the job, a critical-path lead time, and a coarse geometric screen for parts that overlap or sit closer than they should. What it does not get you is a fabrication takeoff — no member schedule, no weld metres, and no joints found in the model. Part by part is the honest description of it.
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