A real case
Twelve grey-iron manifolds off printed sand, and the customer's engineer wants the price broken down before he approves a pattern. Here is what a foundry can show him: the route including degating, fettling and queue time, a ledger where every line names its rate or rule, and a confidence basis per number.
The situation
Twelve castings. EN-GJL-250 grey iron manifold, a validation build for an OEM that intends to order a few thousand a year afterwards, wanted in five weeks. No pattern exists and nobody is cutting one for twelve pieces. The buyer's engineer has asked for the price broken down before he will take the production tooling to his own approvals, and what he means by that is not "how much" — he already has three numbers from three foundries and no way to tell which of them is built the same way. What he is asking is what the price is made of. Most quotes cannot answer that, which is why the cheapest one usually wins and then goes wrong later.
Step by step
The route comes out in full — tooling, forming, degating and fettling, heat treatment, machining, finishing, and the inter-department handling and queue time an estimate normally leaves out entirely — then gets ranked cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps, with each step naming the rule that put it there. Every step is marked in-house or priced with your accepted vendor's markup, so the machining and the coating you send out are on the same sheet as the melt, at the markup you actually pay, instead of arriving later as the reason the job lost money.
Every cost line traces back to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine — never an opaque total. The rates underneath are the ones you set once in Rates Studio: your melt cost, your moulding line, your fettling labour, your heat-treat, your handling. A customer's engineer reading that ledger is reading your foundry's cost structure with names on it, which is a different conversation from defending a lump sum he assumes is padded.
Printed sand molds and cores have their own should-cost path — consumables and printer hours, no pattern tooling — rather than being a cut-pattern quote with a discount applied to it. Then the should-cost curve runs at every quantity, with the exact quantity where one method becomes cheaper than another solved in closed form, so the validation run and the production run he is really asking about are two readings off one curve rather than two unrelated quotes.
Every result carries a confidence value that names its basis: a published prior, a calibration built from your own recorded actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that it needs a human to look at it. On a manifold nobody has poured before, some lines will rest on a published prior and the quote says so instead of hiding it. That is the line that survives contact with a buyer: you are showing him where your own number is soft, before he finds it.
When the twelve are poured, whoever knows what actually happened enters the correction on the cost line itself — the fettling that took twice as long, the yield that came in under the quote — and that feeds a calibration record, so the confidence bands tighten around your foundry's own performance rather than a published average. Corrections are typed in by a person on the line they belong to; that is the loop, and it is worth knowing exactly where it starts before you build a process around it.
What you get
What goes back to the buyer's engineer is not a total. It is a route with degating, fettling, heat treat and queue time on it, a ledger where every line names the rate or rule that produced it, an in-house or vendor marking against each step, and a confidence basis stated per number including the ones resting on a published prior. He can hold his other two quotes against it and see which of them left the handling out. You can hold the same document up in five weeks when the production quantity comes back and read the crossover off the curve rather than re-quoting from scratch. Partimation is decision support, not a guarantee — every result names the rule behind it, and the reason that matters here is that a number you can take apart is the only kind a customer can be argued out of rejecting.
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Built into RouteDFM.
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Built into CostDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
FAQ
The route in full, with each step naming the rule that put it there: tooling, forming, degating and fettling, heat treatment, machining, finishing, and the inter-department handling and queue time most estimates leave off. Underneath it sits a ledger where every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine, and each step is marked in-house or priced at your accepted vendor's markup. A buyer holding three quotes built three different ways can finally see which one left the handling out.
Printed sand molds and cores carry their own should-cost path — consumables and printer hours, no pattern tooling — rather than being priced as a cut-pattern job with a discount on it. The should-cost curve then runs at every quantity with the exact crossover solved in closed form, so a validation run of twelve and the production quantity behind it are two readings off one curve instead of two unrelated quotes.
Every result carries a confidence value that states which of four things it rests on: a published prior, a calibration built from your own recorded actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that it needs a human to look at it. On a part with no history at your foundry, some lines will rest on a published prior and the quote says so rather than hiding it — and the needs-human-review flag is where the last half hour before the quote goes out belongs.
Machine rates, labour rates and the cost model are set once in Rates Studio, and every quote across every process pulls from them — melt, moulding line, fettling, heat treat, handling. The ledger a customer reads is therefore built on your foundry's own rates rather than an industry average with a correction applied by hand afterwards, and each line still names the rate or rule it came from.
Where this fits
You pour metal, and the expensive surprises land late: a section that won't feed, a pattern price someone recalled, a yield nobody scored. Partimation screens the casting before tooling, runs fill and solidification physics on every casting job, prices the pattern into the piece, and quotes on your foundry's rates.
A quote nobody can take apart is a quote nobody can defend. Partimation builds the price as an itemized ledger where every cost line traces to a named rate, posture setting, or engine rule — and every estimate carries a confidence band that states which of four bases it rests on.
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