A real case
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.
The situation
A STEP file lands at twenty to five on a Tuesday afternoon: a 6061-T6 hydraulic manifold, twenty-five off, with a line in the email about a repeat of a hundred in the autumn. The buyer wants a number Thursday morning and has sent the same package to four shops. The part is the kind that eats an afternoon — cross-drilled bores that meet inside the block, two pockets deep enough to matter, and eight threaded ports whose callouts live on a two-sheet print rather than in the model. Quote it off gut feel and the margin is somebody's guess; build the takeoff properly and it is Thursday lunchtime before anyone can price it. Nothing in Partimation picks that email up — there is no RFQ queue here, no multi-RFQ view and no way to assign a job to an estimator. The email, the stack and who picks up what are still yours to run. The clock in this walkthrough starts the moment someone opens the attachment and uploads it, which is the only part of Tuesday afternoon that has to happen before the shop knows what the job looks like.
Step by step
An STL or STEP model and a DXF or PDF drawing go through the same first look, on the same job — no separate tool for each and no second upload. The first pass back off the model carries the holes, the overall envelope and the face counts. Where the buyer sent the print as well, drawing and model are cross-checked on holes, envelope and GD&T-to-face, and anything that disagrees is flagged rather than quietly reconciled — which on a manifold is usually a port callout that never made it into the solid.
Holes, pockets, flats and bores come off the model, each carrying its own confidence. The threaded ports are detected straight off the STEP model and matched against 285 standard thread entries — UNC, UNF, UNJ, NPT, ACME, ISO metric, BSPP and BSPT — each match scored, with shoulder-clearance, wall-thickness and drawing-callout-mismatch issues flagged. A port whose print callout disagrees with the geometry is the question you want to ask the buyer on Wednesday, not the one you find out about at first article.
A real voxel material-removal simulation runs against the tooling you actually use: cycle time reconciled, unreachable features flagged, and leftover stock and gouge depth called out in cubic millimetres rather than argued about. When a pocket wall needs a second setup, a 3+2 setup plan is generated, gouge-checked, indexed and priced into the quote instead of stopping at "needs 5-axis". What this deliberately does not do is model collisions, fixtures or the machine envelope — the workholding call stays with your programmer, and the page says so rather than letting you assume otherwise.
The route comes back built — machining, heat treatment, finishing, and the inter-department handling and queue time an estimate usually drops — with candidate routes ranked cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps and every step naming the rule that priced it. Each step is marked in-house or priced with your own accepted vendor's markup, so the anodizing on this manifold is a line you can compare rather than a number somebody remembers from last year.
Every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine — never an opaque total — and every result 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 a human needs to look at it. A should-cost curve runs at every quantity, so the twenty-five and the autumn hundred are priced on the same screen rather than in two separate takeoffs. The same job 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, and where another method gets cheaper at the autumn quantity the exact crossover quantity is named rather than eyeballed. Moving between the feature read, the route and the price is a panel switch on the same job, not a re-upload.
What you get
Wednesday morning, well inside the deadline you were given, you are holding a price for twenty-five and a price for a hundred, an itemized ledger where every line names the rate or rule that produced it, a cycle time reconciled against an actual removal simulation rather than an average, and a short list of things worth asking the buyer — the port callout that disagreed with the model, and any line whose confidence came back flagged for human review. What Partimation does not do is send the quote: the number goes out on your paperwork, under your name. Decision support, not a guarantee — every result names the rule behind it, and you check it against your shop's practice before it leaves the building. The day you get back is the half day that used to go into rebuilding a takeoff from scratch.
Already shipped
Built into PartDFM.
Built into PartDFM.
Built into MachDFM.
Built into MachDFM.
Built into MachDFM.
Built into MachDFM.
Built into RouteDFM.
Built into RouteDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into ProcessDFM.
Built into PartDFM.
FAQ
Feature detection, the removal simulation, the ranked route and the itemized ledger all run off one upload of the same file, with no re-upload between them, so the half day that used to go into rebuilding a takeoff by hand is not spent again. What still takes your time is checking the result: Partimation is decision support, not a guarantee, and the number goes out on your paperwork, under your name.
Partimation's path begins at an uploaded file. There is no RFQ queue, no multi-RFQ view and no way to assign a job to an estimator — the email, the stack and who picks up what are still yours to run. What changes is everything after somebody opens the attachment.
Threaded features are detected straight off the STEP model and matched against 285 standard thread entries — UNC, UNF, UNJ, NPT, ACME, ISO metric, BSPP and BSPT — each carrying a confidence score, with shoulder-clearance, wall-thickness and drawing-callout-mismatch issues flagged. A port whose print callout disagrees with the geometry becomes a question for the buyer before the quote goes out.
A should-cost curve runs at every quantity, so both order sizes are priced from the same upload on the same screen instead of being built twice. The same job is also screened against casting, molding, forging, machining, sheet metal and additive together, each coming back feasible, marginal or infeasible with the constraint that drove it, and where another method gets cheaper the exact crossover quantity is named.
Collision, fixture and machine-envelope modeling are explicit non-goals of the removal simulation. Leftover stock, gouge depth and unreachable features are quantified and located; whether your workholding clears the head is still a call your programmer makes, and no line in the quote pretends otherwise.
Where this fits
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.
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.
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