Computerised price quoting system for injection mould manufacture

The budget for making injection moulds is inevitably the major development expense that needs to be well prepared and controlled in the toys industry. This is especially important for making hard toys such as Action Figure Toys, which accounted for 27.7% growth as in September 1999 in the total toys industry. The current major practice in the toys industry for quoting prices for manufacturing an injection mould is either by experience or by comparison with a similar product. Owing to the complexity of mould construction and the increasing variety of toys, the application of some commercially available computerised package for estimating the cost of manufacturing injection moulds is inaccurate, impractical or slow. This consequently leads to an underestimated quote which will also become a disaster to the mould manufacturers in terms of manpower planning, delivery schedule and profits. In order to overcome these practical situations and to meet the keen market competition, a user friendly, more accurate mould cost calculation and quotation system should be introduced. This paper focuses on introducing a computerised quotation system for injection mould manufacture (CQSIM) coded in Visual Basic. This can be performed on a personal computer (PC). The system is typically useful for the toys industry area, but it can also be applied in plastics related industry. Based upon a database of costing elements, an integrated system is established for the purpose of streamlining the process of mould cost quoting. Apart from improving the accuracy and efficiency of mould quoting, the system is focussed upon robustness, such as being easy to learn, use and update. The system was designed to be expandable and to be integrated with other material planning systems, such as engineering resource planning (ERP) or systems, applications, and products in data processing (SAP).