Who it's for
You run a CNC or contract machine shop, twenty to fifty RFQs land a week, and one senior estimator gates all of them. Upload the model or the drawing you were already sent, get the route built and ranked, and send a price where every line names the rate or rule behind it.
Is this you?
You run a CNC or contract machine shop, and the work arrives as other people's RFQs. Twenty a week in a quiet one, fifty when a customer is re-sourcing. Some come with a STEP file. Plenty come as a PDF drawing and a part number — and a scanned drawing on its own is enough here to pull dimensions, tolerances and GD&T, each value carrying its own confidence score, with a tolerance tighter than the process can hold flagged rather than priced by accident. When the model turns up a week after the print, drawing and model get cross-checked on holes, envelope and GD&T-to-face, and any disagreement is flagged rather than quietly reconciled. You win on turnaround, and you lose margin on the ones nobody had time to work out properly.
This is written for the people who put the number on: the owner watching win rate, the chief estimator who is also the queue, the estimator rebuilding a takeoff for a part very like one that went out last spring.
It is not written for you if you make one product at volume and price it once a year, or if what you want is a system that quotes the job without you in it. Partimation is decision support, not a guarantee — every result names the rule behind it, and you check it against your shop's practice before it goes out under your name. The free tier is ten parts or estimates a month with no credit card, which is enough to run an RFQ you already quoted and see whether the two numbers agree.
A typical day
Thirty RFQs came in over the weekend and one person in the building can turn any of them into a number. Everything behind that desk ages while it waits, and the buyer who sent it to five shops is not waiting with it.
No STEP file, sometimes a scan of a scan of a print older than the machine it runs on. The dimensions, the tolerances and the general notes have to come off the page by hand before anyone can price a single operation.
Nobody knows what the deep pocket, the undercut, or the stock that no tool can reach really costs until the part is on the machine. Quote it light and you eat the difference; quote it heavy and somebody faster takes the job.
Setup ran long, the second op needed a fixture nobody quoted, and the margin on a job you were pleased to win turns out to belong to somebody else. Next month the same family of parts goes out priced exactly the same way.
What changes
Holes, pockets, flats and bores get detected off the model, each with a confidence, and a real material-removal simulation runs against the tooling — reconciling cycle time, flagging the features nothing can reach, and calling out leftover stock and gouge depth. When an undercut needs a second setup, a 3+2 setup plan is generated, gouge-checked and priced into the quote, instead of stopping at "needs 5-axis". Platen size, daylight and handling limits are checked against the machine classes your shop actually runs, with a named reason when a part exceeds them. No collision or fixture modeling is claimed.
Every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting, or a rule in the engine — never an opaque total. Your machine rates, labor rates and cost model live in Rates Studio, set by the shop once, and every quote across every process pulls from them, so two estimators running the same job pull the same numbers. Every estimate carries a confidence band that states which of four bases it rests on: a published prior, your own shop-calibrated actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that it needs human review. Suggest a correction on a line when the floor comes back with what actually happened, and the bands tighten on the jobs after it.
Tooling, forming, heat treatment, machining, finishing, and the inter-department handling and queue time an estimate usually drops — built as the actual route and ranked cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps, each step naming its rule. Every step is marked in-house or priced with your own accepted vendor's markup, so sending it out is a line you can compare instead of an argument you can have. The same upload is screened against casting, molding, forging, machining, sheet metal and additive together, each coming back feasible, marginal or infeasible with the constraint that drove it.
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.
The quote said eleven hours, the floor ran fourteen, and the next quote for the same family said eleven again. Every cost line names the rate or rule that produced it and states what its confidence rests on, so a correction lands on the line that was wrong and tightens the bands on the jobs after it.
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 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.
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.
A run of stainless sensor bodies came off the floor three hours over the quoted machine time, and the repeat order is already in. Read the ledger line by line, see what each line's confidence rests on, correct the one that was wrong with what actually happened, and quote the repeat on your own shop's numbers.
A 6061 manifold, twenty-five off, price wanted Thursday morning. One STEP upload gets the features and the threaded ports read, the removal simulation run, the route ranked and the ledger priced at both quantities — without rebuilding the takeoff by hand or re-uploading the part between screens.
A stainless valve body, twelve off, and the one person who prices this customer's work is away until Monday. Rates set once by the shop, manufacturability findings on upload, a strategy verdict per feature naming the requirement that decided it, and a ledger the chief estimator can audit line by line.
FAQ
Rates Studio is where your shop's machine rates, labor rates and cost model live, set once, with every quote across every process pulling from them — so the number prices your shop rather than an industry average. Platen size, daylight and handling limits are checked against the machine classes you actually run, with a named reason when a part exceeds them. What gets replaced is the takeoff you rebuild from scratch every time, not your judgment about what your shop is good at.
A scanned or PDF drawing on its own is enough to pull dimensions, tolerances and GD&T, each value carrying its own confidence score, and to flag a tolerance tighter than the process can hold. When the model turns up afterwards, drawing and model are cross-checked on holes, envelope and GD&T-to-face, and any disagreement is flagged rather than quietly reconciled.
A confidence band on every estimate states which of four bases it rests on — a published prior, your own shop-calibrated actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that it needs human review — so a number built before your shop has any history in the model says so plainly instead of pretending otherwise. Corrections entered when a job comes back move the estimates after it onto your own actuals.
Machining shops still hit the make-or-buy call on a step, and still get asked why a part costs what it does at a given quantity. Every route step is marked in-house or priced with your own accepted vendor's markup, and one upload is screened against casting, molding, forging, machining, sheet metal and additive together, each coming back feasible, marginal or infeasible with the constraint that drove it.
Ten parts or estimates a month on the free tier, no credit card — enough to put an RFQ you already quoted through the same upload and see whether the route, the cycle time and the price agree with what your shop actually sent and what the job actually ran.
Get started
Send a model or a drawing and book a walkthrough — or start free and run one through yourself.
Book a demo
Tell us about your shop and we'll set up a walkthrough on a real part.