Part costing

[MJuric]

We are suffering from the same issues I suspect that many manufacturing companies are and that is an ever widening skills gap combined with an ever shrinking skilled labor market.

Over the last two to three years we have had several people retire that had the ability and skill set to quote parts, projects etc. Those tasks have fallen on the shoulders of fewer and fewer people and worse yet in some cases completely out of some business groups because the entire department lacks the capability.

We are currently exploring multiple tools to aid in quoting, AI, other softwares etc. My question here is specifically about SW Costing module.

• I have only used it cursorily - Has anyone set it up and or had any good outcomes with it?
  Is it flexible enough to be able to get into detail such as machining time, various machines etc?
  Is it still being develop and or improved?

Just grasping at straws which seems to me my new method of operating.

[jcapriotti]

@MJuric I'll just give my thoughts on this type of software in general. I've not used SolidWorks Costing. Our company did invest in and use a similar software called APriori a few years back. It does a similar function and had more capabilities than the SolidWorks Costing module did.....at least 10 years ago.

The principal was similar. Create materials, manufacturing processes (machining, bending, assembly), routings, etc for your manufacturing in a database, then in the software, map that to your part. APriori was standalone, so we imported STEP files. It had its own built in viewer and parts tree, then you mapped processes. It had some automation to try and auto map. Wasn't great but worked ok in some instances.

We dropped it around 2017. The reasons:

1. It was really expensive. Part of that was Apriori would keep a database of materials, standard processes, and their costs up to date per quarter.
2. You really need someone dedicated to setting it up and maintaining it. Depending on company size, this can be a full time job to keep up with changes to your processes. Also, Apriori standard database of costs may not apply to all of your companies materials, processes and need tweaking.
3. The complexity of setting up models and assemblies for costing was complicated enough that you needed people doing it all the time to be any good at it.

Our company just wasn't committed on the last 2 points.

[MJuric]

1. It was really expensive. Part of that was Apriori would keep a database of materials, standard processes, and their costs up to date per quarter.
2. You really need someone dedicated to setting it up and maintaining it. Depending on company size, this can be a full time job to keep up with changes to your processes. Also, Apriori standard database of costs may not apply to all of your companies materials, processes and need tweaking.
3. The complexity of setting up models and assemblies for costing was complicated enough that you needed people doing it all the time to be any good at it.

Our company just wasn't committed on the last 2 points.

Our processes do not change much especially in the areas this would get the most use. The third point would be a problem because absolutely no one around here spends the time to do things correctly. We'd buy something and "Just expect it to work". People are shocked around here that our ERP doesn't work. They seemed to completely fail to realize that We never set it up correctly, we never learned how to use it correctly, we never cleaned up all our crappy legacy data, we never even learned what we should be using on it...so shocker...sometimes it doesn't do what we think it should.