Solutions
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.
Where it shows up
Fourteen hours on the floor against eleven in the quote. Everyone in the building knows. The next quote for the same family of parts still says eleven, because nothing carried the difference back.
The quote is a total with a margin on it. When the actuals come back short there is no line to point at, so the correction gets applied as a feeling about the whole number.
Somebody adds fifteen percent to anything with a deep pocket because of a job in 2019. Nobody remembers whether it was the pocket or the material, nobody can test it, and it rides on every quote since.
Job costing knows what the work took. The estimate that started it is in a spreadsheet nobody opens twice, so the two numbers spend their whole lives in different rooms.
What it costs
A quote that runs long once is a bad day. A quote that runs long the same way every time is a margin leak on a schedule. It costs you the jobs won at a price that never covered the work, and the jobs lost because the padding grew until the whole quote stopped being competitive. Neither appears as a line anywhere. They appear as a year that was busier than it was profitable.
How it plays out
Every cost line traces to a named rate, a posture setting, or a rule in the engine, and every result states what 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. Drift gets an address. CostDFM.
The route carries tooling, forming, degating and fettling, heat treatment, machining, finishing, and the inter-department handling and queue time — the part of a job that quietly runs long precisely because no line was ever opened for it. RouteDFM.
Machining time is reconciled against a real material-removal simulation run on the tooling you actually use, with unreachable stock and leftover material called out, instead of an average applied to a part the average never saw. MachDFM.
Say what actually happened on a cost line and that correction feeds a calibration record, so confidence bands tighten as your own shop's actuals come in. The next quote for a part like it rests on your outcomes rather than on a published prior. CostDFM.
Already shipped
What makes drift fixable is that the model never hides which parts of itself are borrowed. Four bases, named on every result: a published prior, your shop's own calibrated actuals, a deterministic rule, or needs-human-review. A line resting on a published prior is the first line your corrections should move, and you can see it before the job runs rather than after. Decision support, not a final answer — validate it against your shop's practice before you commit.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into CostDFM.
Built into RouteDFM.
Built into MachDFM.
See it for your team
FAQ
Drift that leans the same way every time usually means one assumption is wrong in one place, not that estimating is hard. Because every cost line names the rate, posture setting, or engine rule behind it, the difference can be traced to a line instead of being absorbed into the total — and a correction entered against that line feeds the next quote.
Corrections go in against the cost line they belong to: whoever closes the job says what that step really took, and the entry becomes a calibration record. Nothing has to be reconciled between systems for it to count, and nothing gets inferred behind your back. Bands tighten on the lines your own outcomes now cover.
A blanket percentage stacks two errors: overpricing the jobs that were always fine while still underpricing the ones that were not. Naming the basis under each line separates them. A figure resting on a published prior is a candidate for correction; one resting on your own recorded outcomes has already been paid for once.
Bands tighten as corrections arrive, line by line, so the parts you quote most often calibrate first and there is no threshold to cross before anything changes. Until a line has your outcomes behind it, the result says so and names the published prior it is standing on instead of dressing a borrowed figure up as yours.
Both quotes are itemized, and each line names the rate, posture setting, or rule that produced it along with the basis its confidence rests on. A price that moved therefore moved somewhere specific — a rate, a route step, a corrected cycle time — which is a defensible answer to give a buyer rather than a revised total with no story.
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