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SOLIDWORKS Costing an in depthReview Part 4 - TemplatesI performed a day of consulting on SOLIDWORKS Costing, part of SOLIDWORKS Professional and higher.The customer builds equipment for their clients that have lots of sheet metal parts. They invited me into see if I could help, being the SOLIDWORKS expert. Notice, I said SOLIDWORKS expert, notSOLIDWORKS Costing expert. I’ve been using SOLIDWORKS for fifteen years now and I’m still learningnew stuff about the software. I went to the SOLIDWORKS WORLD Presentation archive to see whatothers had done in the past, so I don’t repeat their mistakes. With that said, I’m going to break downhow we started the proof of concept for SOLIDWORKS Costing for the customer. This article coverssheet metal; we will probably circle back and do one for prismatic, turned, injection molded, and 3dprinted parts, check back to the article summery later for more PDFs.PlanningWhen it comes to planning we must understand the parts of the costing template. Without that bit ofknowledge first you can dig a huge hole for yourself with very little effort. Pick a project you havealready quoted out in the past to test your numbers. I prefer a range of sizes and number of bends fortesting purposes.General informationThe General tab is all about money, what you are using and how much extra you want your client to payby default, using the Default Markup/Discount
MaterialLearning from the mistakes of others and some great SOLIDWORKS World presentations from ToddBlacksher of TMCO Inc, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. If you learn nothing else from this blog articlelearn this, startsmall. As you will see with Operations section the number of materials andthicknesses are very important. If you have steel for example as a class, you might have 4-10 differentmaterial types of steel. When you start adding gauges the number of entries you have to manage andupdate later begin to go up.NOTE:The Classes and SOLIDWORKS Materials come from the SOLIDWORKS Material database so if you don’t have all yourmaterials in there you want to create all your variants there. Also make sure you share the material database on the network ifyou are sharing the costing templates.Thickness (aka gauges)For every Class you have Materials, for every Material you, for every Material you have Thicknesses, andfor every Thickness you have cost. This is why in this situation we started with one class, one material,and three gauges. We picked galvanized in this situation because it was the most prolific in project andwe had good information on it.Cost of Thickness how did we get there?The unit of measure for the cost is Currency/Weight, in this situation it is dollars per pounds. The easiestway to figure out this value is to use the following equation.
(Cost STD) / (Weight STD) (Cost per pound)Cost STD : Cost of a standard sheet of material of that gauge.Weight STD: Weight of same standard sheet of material of that gaugeThis is pretty much easy, except you may have to do some upfront work to gather all your standardsheet sizes and pricing from purchasing. Now how much of this data you use is really up to; “how I planon using costing?” Do you want to use this for quoting or a close estimate, those are very differentthings.Cut/Bend/Library FeaturesThis next is all about your manufacturing process. Capture you machines for bending and cutting of yourmetal. You’ll notice a setup cost, many of us call this make ready cost, and it is usually a value dividedamong the lot of parts you are making. This is can get big very quickly, because you can have Material,Gauge, and Cut Method to cost out.Cost of Thickness how did we get there?The easiest we did this was looking at the cost of manufacturing part from our project and using that tohelp back calculate everything.CutsCut list properties in SOLIDWORKS are a great place to get all the info you may need about a sheet metalpart, I love this tool. Right mouse button click on the Cust-List-Item for your sheet metal part and bringup properties.
The cut list properties window gave me and the custom lots of great info included outer length for thesheet metal flat pattern. So this is what we did your recipe can and will be different.(Cost to run cutting machine per hour) /{ (number of parts cut in an hour)*(cut length of the part)} (Cost per unit length of cut)We used this similar methodology on bending as well.{(Cost to bend the part)-(make ready cost per part)}/(Number of bends in the part) (Cost per Bend)NOTE: Make sure that the total number of bends SOLIDWORKS sees jives with what you would do in amanufacturing process. Due to features or design styles you will probably have more bends then you need forquoting. Example an jog command in SOLIDWDORKS creates two bends as far as the modeler is concern butmanufacturing would use an offset tool and hit it with a single op. You can RMB click on any extra bends in thecosting property manager and assign a No Cost Assignment to them, just something I found to work around it.CustomCustom is a catch all for the operations you don’t see the solid model. You can add ops based on thefollowing selection types.
Part: Applies the operation cost per part. For example, serial number entry is applied per partWeight: Applies the operation cost per unit weight. For example, shipping cost is applied per unit weightFace: Applies the operation cost per square area of the selected faces. For example, painting cost is applied per square areaEdge: Applies the operation cost per unit length of the selected edges. For example, deburring is applied per unit lengthStroke: Applies the operation cost per stroke operation. For example, a punch cost is applied per stroke.Have a great day,Bob McGaughey, CSWETechnical Applications ManagerComputer Aided Technology, LLC.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 postingnew articles to this series as we continue to dive deep into this topic. All of thesearticles will be stored in the category of Daily Dose.of SolidWorks Support and links toeach article with their release date are listed below: SOLIDWORKS Costing an in depth Review Part 1 - Overview (BryanPawlak 6/23/15) SOLIDWORKS Costing an in depth Review Part 2 – How Costing Works (John VanEngen 6/2415) SOLIDWORKS Costing an in depth Review Part 3 – Options (Blake Cokinis 6/25/15) SOLIDWORKS Costing an in depth Review Part 4 - Templates (Bob McGaughey6/26/15) SOLIDWORKS Costing an in depth Review Part 5 – Task Pane, Manager, & Sensors(Neil Bucalo 6/29/15)
to see if I could help, being the SOLIDWORKS expert. Notice, I said SOLIDWORKS expert, not SOLIDWORKS Costing expert. I've been using SOLIDWORKS for fifteen years now and I'm still learning new stuff about the software. I went to the SOLIDWORKS WORLD Presentation archive to see what others had done in the past, so I don't repeat their .
