EC: SolidWorks Costing for sheet metal and machined components
Software – Control design: SolidWorks Costing from Dassault Systemes quickly estimates the manufacturing costs of designs made from sheet metal and machined components, eliminating budget and time issues during the design process. This is a Control Engineering 2012 Engineers’ Choice finalist.
Making parts within budget—especially in today's economic climate—is just as important as getting drawings out on time. SolidWorks Costing from Dassault Systemes is a tool that helps eliminate budget and time issues by quickly generating estimates of part manufacturing costs that adjust as a design is modified. The tool works by looking at various part features and assigning them to specific manufacturing operations. Designers and engineers are able to make more informed design decisions based on cost by continually modeling different scenarios to find the most efficient one. A template editor allows users to modify templates to match internal manufacturing or vendor processes. In the templates, users can specify the material used to create the part, the manufacturing processes, and the associated costs of these materials and manufacturing operations. It also automates the quoting process that can then lead to an increase in manufacturing sales opportunities. As the tool is used, everything is automatically captured in a highly detailed report comparing the most current concept to the baseline, making it easy to present costing in a design review.
An important part of any design change is justification. With the costing report, users can clearly highlight the impact of specific design features or changes on product cost. The costing report is completely automatic and contains cost information down to the individual operations. To aid in rolling up assembly costs in a BOM, and graphically visualizing differences in part costs in Assembly Visualization, a new property called Calculated Cost has been added to SolidWorks parts. The value of this property is automatically set to the current cost of the part as calculated by the SolidWorks Costing tool. Overall, by using SolidWorks Costing, designers are able to easily track costs to ensure projects stay on target and meet profit goals.
www.solidworks.com/sw/products/10153_ENU_HTML.htm
Dassault Systemes SolidWorks Corp.
Return to the list of the 2012 Engineers' Choice finalists.
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In a year when manufacturing continued to lead the economic rebound, it makes sense that plant manager bonuses rebounded. Plant Engineering’s annual Salary Survey shows both wages and bonuses rose in 2012 after a retreat the year before.
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