A real case
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.
The situation
It is Thursday and the chief estimator is at a customer's plant until Monday. On the desk: a 17-4 PH stainless valve body, twelve off, a STEP file and a two-sheet print, and a buyer who wants a number by Friday afternoon. The estimator who is in has priced brackets and plates for a year and has never quoted this customer's valve work. What the shop charges for a fourth-axis setup, whether the undercut around the seat gets a second setup or a form tool, which rate covers the hard-turned bore, and what went wrong the last time this alloy came through — all of it lives in one person's head and in a spreadsheet on one person's machine. This page is about who can do the work, not how fast the work goes. Nothing here picks a job off a stack, assigns it, or shows anyone what is queued behind it; what changes is what the second person can do once the file is open in front of them.
Step by step
Machine rates, labor rates and the cost model live in Rates Studio, set by the shop rather than carried privately, and every quote across every process pulls from them. The estimator who is in does not have to know what the fourth-axis hour is worth here, because there is only one set of numbers to pull and it is not the one on the absent estimator's laptop. Two people running the same valve body land on the same rates, which is the difference between covering for someone and guessing on their behalf.
Manufacturability findings come back on every upload, before a process has been chosen — so nobody is sitting on a file for two days waiting for the one person who can look at a part and say whether it is worth quoting at all. On this part that means the seat undercut and the wall thickness behind it are named on Thursday, not discovered on Monday.
Every recognized machining feature is checked against a strategy playbook of eighteen built-in strategies and comes back selected, rejected, deprioritized or uncertain — each verdict quoting the exact requirement text that decided it. "Uncertain" is shown distinctly and never folded into "rejected", which matters more here than anywhere else: the uncertain verdicts are precisely the list the covering estimator should be asking about rather than quietly deciding. Alongside them, holes, pockets, flats and bores are detected with a confidence each, and where the undercut needs a second setup a 3+2 setup plan is generated, gouge-checked, indexed and priced into the quote rather than left as a note for whoever programs it.
Open a quote or a DFM check on a part with a matching history and the approved shop-knowledge card that answers it is already there — symptom, cause and action, tagged by process, machine, alloy and part family. The thing the chief estimator would have said out loud about this alloy is on the screen without anyone having to know to ask for it.
Every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine, and every result states which of four bases its confidence 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 quote built by whoever was free on Thursday is therefore a quote the chief estimator can take apart line by line on Monday — and the lines flagged for human review are where they should start.
What you get
The buyer gets a number on Friday instead of an apology, and the person who sent it can say where each line came from. What the chief estimator finds on Monday is not a mystery total but an itemized ledger, a route whose every step names its rule, a set of strategy verdicts with the requirement text that decided each one, and a short list of features that came back uncertain and were escalated rather than assumed. Partimation is decision support, not a guarantee, and it does not replace the judgment that makes someone a chief estimator — it takes the rates, the route and the recorded reasons out of one person's head so the shop does not stop when that person does. The queue itself does not change: no job here gets assigned or tracked, and the stack on Monday morning is still yours to sort.
Already shipped
Built into CostDFM.
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Built into MachDFM.
Built into Partimation Core.
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Built into CostDFM.
FAQ
Every recognized machining feature is checked against a playbook of eighteen built-in strategies and returns selected, rejected, deprioritized or uncertain, quoting the exact requirement text that decided it. Reading a verdict and its requirement is a different job from inventing the decision, and it is one a second estimator can do on a part they have never quoted.
An uncertain verdict is shown distinctly and never folded into "rejected", so a feature nobody has enough information about does not quietly become a priced decision. For an estimator covering someone else's work those uncertain features are the escalation list — the questions worth a phone call before the quote goes out.
Judgment is what does not move into the tool. Partimation is decision support, not a guarantee: it names the rate or rule behind every line and flags the results that need a human, and someone still has to decide whether this customer, this alloy and this delivery date are worth the number. What stops being a bottleneck is the rates, the route and the recorded reasons — not the person.
Every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine, and every result states which of four bases its confidence rests on — a published prior, the shop's own calibrated actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that a human needs to look at it. A quote built on Thursday can be taken apart line by line on Monday, starting with the lines that were flagged for review.
An approved shop-knowledge card carrying the symptom, the cause and the action, tagged by process, machine, alloy and part family, opens with the next job that matches it. What one person would have said out loud about an alloy or a setup arrives on the screen of whoever is quoting, including the estimator who was not there the first time it went wrong.
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.
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.
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