Who it's for
You buy parts you did not design, priced by suppliers whose numbers you cannot take apart. Partimation gives the buy side its own should-cost: an itemized ledger where every line names its rate or rule, a process verdict that names the constraint behind it, and the exact quantity where a cheaper method takes over.
Is this you?
You buy parts you did not draw. A price lands with a lead time, a tooling line and a per-piece figure, and you are the one who has to say yes, no, or that looks heavy — with no shop behind you to check any of it. You know your category, your spend and your supply base cold. What you do not have is the manufacturing background to argue about a cycle time, a wall section or a die block, and that is exactly the ground a supplier defends a price on. If you set the tolerances yourself, or you own the machines the part runs on, this is not your page. This one is for the person holding a quote and a target price who has to decide whether the two are anywhere near each other. What makes that possible without a manufacturing background is that nothing here comes back as a bare verdict: every manufacturability finding carries the rule that caught it, every process verdict names the constraint that drove it, and every cost line names the rate or rule that produced it. You do not have to know why a thin wall is a problem to ask a supplier about that wall by name.
A typical day
One supplier priced it machined from billet, one as a casting plus machining, one will not say. The total is the only thing all three share, so cheapest becomes the only comparison available — and it is the comparison that hides the most.
With no independent should-cost, the anchor in every conversation is the price you were sent. You can push on it, but you cannot say what the part should cost, so the concession you get is whatever the supplier decided in advance to leave in.
A pattern, a die or a mold arrives as one figure with a story attached. You cannot check it and you cannot see the quantity at which it pays back, so it becomes the part of the quote nobody argues with — and the part that decides whether the volume you are committing to makes sense.
You think the price is heavy on one operation and you have no way to name which. Asking why it costs that much invites a paragraph. Asking about a named constraint or a named rate invites a number.
What changes
The price comes back as a ledger, not a total: every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine, and every estimate carries a confidence band that states which of four bases it rests on — a published prior, a calibration built from recorded actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that the number needs human review. You arrive at the conversation with a figure of your own and the working behind it, and you can see which lines are solid before you decide which ones to open.
One upload gets screened against casting, molding, forging, machining, sheet metal and additive together, and each comes back feasible, marginal or infeasible with the constraint that drove it. Under that sits a should-cost curve at every quantity and the exact quantity where one method gets cheaper than another — closed-form, not eyeballed off a chart. A supplier quoting a different process stops being a quote you cannot line up against the others. Tooling is priced by one shared block-and-machining model and amortized into the per-piece curve, so the payback quantity is on the same picture as the piece price.
A multi-body STEP, 3MF or STL splits into placed parts and rolls up into a single costed BOM — the cheapest feasible route per part at your quantity, non-recurring tooling counted once per part instead of once per quote, and a lead time taken off the real critical-path part rather than the sum of everything on the list. A coarse geometric screen also flags parts that overlap or sit closer than they should; that screen is advisory, not a mating solver and not a tolerance stack-up.
Where to start
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tool cost is usually a figure someone remembers from the last job that looked like this one. Partimation prices dies, molds, patterns and core boxes through one shared block-and-machining model and amortizes the tool into the per-piece should-cost curve, so the number has a basis you can push back on.
Cast because the last one was cast. Machined because the shop machines. Partimation screens a part against casting, molding, forging, machining, sheet metal and additive together — each verdict naming the constraint behind it — and solves the exact quantity where a cheaper process takes over.
Undercuts, thin walls, hot spots and missing draft usually surface at first article, when the pattern or the die already exists. Partimation flags them on the uploaded part with the rule that caught each one, and runs GPU fill and solidification physics on every casting job — before anyone commits steel.
Splitting the scope with a supplier is usually argued, not costed. Partimation builds the whole route and prices every step in-house or at your own accepted vendor's markup, with the queue days it adds — and stops short of shopping that step around your supply base, because nothing here does that.
Two approved suppliers, five working days each, and a program cost review on Thursday morning. Upload the multi-body STEP the day engineering releases it and hold a costed BOM roll-up — cheapest feasible route per part, tooling counted once, critical-path lead time — before a single quote comes back.
A renewal price arrives with a total on it and nothing else. Build an independent should-cost off the released STEP first: an itemized ledger where every line names its rate, a confidence band naming which of four bases it rests on, and the exact quantity where a cheaper process takes over.
FAQ
Price the part independently first, then hold the three quotes against that. One upload gets screened against casting, molding, forging, machining, sheet metal and additive together, each verdict naming the constraint that drove it, with a should-cost curve at every quantity and the exact quantity where one method gets cheaper than another. Three prices built on three processes then sit against one curve instead of only against each other.
An itemized should-cost of your own. The price is built as a ledger where every line traces to a named rate, a posture setting or a rule in the engine, and every estimate carries a confidence band naming which of four bases it rests on: a published prior, a calibration built from recorded actuals, a deterministic rule, or a flag that the number needs human review. The anchor in the conversation stops being the figure the supplier sent.
Vendor comparison is not something the suite does. A route step is either marked in-house or priced with a single accepted vendor's markup plus the queue days that step adds — no quote solicitation, no marketplace, and no market rate invented on your behalf. What gets priced is the work itself, which is the number a supplier's price then gets held against.
A named constraint or a named rate, quoted back at them. Every manufacturability finding carries the rule that caught it, every process verdict names the constraint that drove it, and every cost line names the rate or rule that produced it — so the question stops being why the part costs that much and becomes a question about one wall section, one rate, or one quantity. A supplier can answer a question that specific, and the answer is checkable.
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