Using the Galorath Team to Create ‘Job Shop’ Estimation Efficiencies

A moderately sized company that delivers precision machined parts to the Aerospace market needed better cost estimating tools to more quickly and accurately assess costs and the competitive price for work packages they were pursuing.

The Challenge

The company was a “Job Shop” competing for relatively small quantity runs. The number of estimates and the complexity of the products required considerable effort from senior assets to accurately estimate the effort. This company also has specialized equipment and processes that give it a competitive advantage. The challenge was to create a quick and accurate bid package that required a minimum amount of effort from subject matter experts and management.

Our Solution

The solution chosen was SEER-MFG augmented with the SEER 3-D modeling extension. SEER 3-D takes the features of engineering models (Engineering CAD Models) and maps them into the SEER-MFG estimating model in a matter of seconds. The simple customizing capabilities inherent to SEER-MFG and SEER 3-D were used to tune and calibrate SEER to their specific capabilities.

The Results

After spending approximately one day training on the SEER 3-D tool, custom manufacturing environments, machine tool descriptions, cutter descriptions, and K-Bases were created for a specific, very high-performance machine in their shop. Blind SEER estimates were run on historically successful parts and projects. Results from SEER were very close to the historical actual data. In at least one case, the SEER estimate was less than 3% variance to the actual data.

These users found the opportunity to confidently create accurate estimates far more quickly than their standard process had been previously.