Solutions
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.
Where it shows up
Heat treat, plating, a grinding operation — the decision to run it or send it out gets settled in a two-minute conversation, and nothing about that conversation lands in the estimate anyone can look at later.
The vendor's markup is on a rate sheet somewhere. The days the part spends in their queue, plus the transfer out and the transfer back, are carried in someone's head and quietly missing from the lead time you promised.
Cutting sprues free, grinding parting flash, moving a part between departments — real hours and real queue days that rarely survive an estimate built one process at a time by one person per process.
The step went out at 50 pieces, so it goes out at 500 too. The reasoning behind the original call lives with whoever made it, and it was never written down in a form the next quote could reuse.
What it costs
Keeping a step in-house ties up a machine that a paying job needed, and nobody books that against the decision. Sending it out spends a markup and a queue you never priced, and the date you promised moves without anyone deciding it should. Either way the job is already quoted by the time the real cost surfaces, the margin is gone before the traveler reaches the floor, and the next similar job gets decided the same way, by the same feel, by the same person.
How it plays out
Tooling, forming, degating and fettling, heat treatment, machining, finishing, and the handling and queue time every move between departments actually costs — built as one route and ranked cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps, with each step marked in-house or priced with your accepted vendor's markup. RouteDFM.
Holes, pockets, flats, bores and bosses are detected with a confidence each, and a real voxel removal simulation against actual tooling shows what stock is unreachable — so "we can run that here" is checked rather than assumed. MachDFM.
Every cost line traces to a named rate, posture setting or engine rule, so the in-house version and the sourced version differ by figures you can point at instead of by whose turn it was to be confident. CostDFM.
A multi-body assembly rolls up into one costed BOM — cheapest feasible route per part, tooling counted once across the job, and a critical-path lead time that includes the steps you decided to send out. AssemblyDFM.
Already shipped
The sourced side of the comparison uses the markup your shop has already accepted for that vendor, set once in your own cost model. Partimation does not solicit quotes, run a vendor marketplace, or invent a rate on your behalf — a made-up market number would make the comparison feel rigorous and be worth nothing. What it does is apply your own number the same way to every step, on every route, with the lead time that step adds shown next to it.
Built into RouteDFM.
Built into RouteDFM.
Built into MachDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into AssemblyDFM.
See it for your team
The machined parts inside a steel job are where make-or-buy actually gets decided. Each route step comes back marked in-house or priced at your accepted vendor's markup with the queue days it adds, and the in-house side is checked against a real removal simulation rather than a memory of the last one.
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.
FAQ
Base it on the route rather than the step. Partimation builds the whole thing — tooling, forming, degating and fettling, heat treatment, machining, finishing, and the handling and queue time between departments — then ranks candidate routes cheapest, quickest and fewest-steps. Every step carries a mark for in-house or sourced, so both versions of the decision are priced on one screen.
Pricing a sourced step uses your own accepted vendor's markup, already set in your cost model — not a solicitation, not a marketplace, not a market rate somebody else invented. The estimate reflects what that step costs when your shop sends it to the vendor it already uses, including the days that adds, so the call happens before anyone picks up a phone.
Queue and handling are usually the missing lines. A sourced step adds the vendor's lead time on top of the transfer out and the transfer back, and an estimate built one process at a time rarely counts either. Routes here price inter-department handling and queue time as real steps, and rank by quickest as well as by cheapest, so the schedule cost of sending work out is visible.
Usually into the work around the step. Degating and fettling, heat treatment, a transfer each way, and on a multi-part job the tooling that should be counted once across the whole BOM — an estimate built per process drops all of it. Every route step prices with the rule that produced it, so the cheaper-looking option has to survive the full ledger before you commit to it.
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Send a model or a drawing and book a walkthrough — or start free and run one through yourself.
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