Development of an Affordable Cost Estimation Tool for Machined Parts

Cost estimation of manufacturing processes is quite important, as it can be used to provide budgets to costumers, by providing these budgets accurately and in a fast manner greatly contributes for good relations between the company and the costumers. However, providing these accurate budgets is quite difficult and time-consuming for some processes. There is currently a lack of simple and inexpensive cost estimation tools, especially for manufacturing processes such as the machining one. In the present work, a cost estimation tool for milling operations was developed, calculating these costs based on the machining times and the initial amount of needed material. The developed tool can determine the total operation time needed to completely produce a certain part, providing information regarding these times, from the preparation stages to the final finishing operations. This tool was validated, by producing several machined parts and comparing the experimental values that were obtained to those provided by the developed cost estimation tool. The results were quite satisfactory, determining machining times quite accurately, however, for finishing operations there is still a slight associated error, primarily caused by the complexity of the produced parts.