SOLIDWORKS Costing an in-depth Review Part 2 – How Costing Works

Welcome to part 2 of SOLIDWORKS Costing! This is a short but sweet explanation to how Costing does its thing. We will look into templates and modifications in later sections.

How Costing Works:

SOLIDWORKS Costing is able to create the estimates based off of manufacturing features. Costing does its own feature recognition to change the SOLIDWORKS feature into a manufacturing process. It recognizes that the hole created in a sheet metal part would be created by a process such as laser, waterjet, or plasma cutting etc. If it is a machined part, Costing would recognize the process of making a hole as a drilled hole. Fillets or straight edges of a part become cutting paths.

Calculating Cost:

SOLIDWORKS Costing uses templates to match the process defined by the recognition program to a cost for labor, machining, and materials. The values can be adjusted and setup for your own company estimates. Then it will figure out and track the total cost of the part.

SolidWorks

Customizing Costing:

There are several options to customizing costing. As mentioned before you can customize the templates to add your own estimated costs for labor, machining, and materials. You can also assign overrides, discounts, custom operations, quantities, and add markup costs. Costs can be assigned to multibody parts with a custom cost. You are allowed to remove costing information to reduce your templates as well as adding features. Costing allows report generation to display the quote and customer information.

Miscellaneous notes:

The costing information is stored inside the SOLIDWORKS part model and its visibility to others can be controlled.

SOLIDWORKS Costing will determine the best option possible if the item is not represented in the templates. It will choose the closest match and use those values to perform the estimate and will alert the user by showing a warning icon in the task pane to alert the user to a discrepancy with for an example that the material thickness of the part does not match the templates.

We hope this series gives you some good insight to the SOLIDWORKS COSTING product.  Please check back to the CATI Blog as the Dedicated Support Team will continue posting new articles to this series as we continue to dive deep into this topic.   All of these articles will be stored in the category of Daily Dose…..of SOLIDWORKS Support and links to each article with their release date are listed below:

John Van Engen
CATI Senior Technical Analyst

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