What’s New in SOLIDWORKS 2017 – Costing
Hi, everybody! Every year, SOLIDWORKS rolls out a new version with many great enhancements, and this year is no different. In this article, I’m going to show you some of the top enhancements to the costing module in SOLIDWORKS 2017. In case you aren’t familiar with Costing, it’s a tool to get accurate manufacturing costs of your part and assemblies available in SOLIDWORKS Professional and Premium, respectively. Let’s take a look at some of this year’s improvements. I’ll show them using this Torso Frame. When costing an assembly, you now have the option to do a Flat Tree or Nested Tree. The Flat Tree will cost all of the parts individually, while the Nested Tree will allow you to cost the subassemblies as one entity. Here are is the assembly tree, and the flat tree and nested option. You can see the difference in the costing trees:
 Assembly assemblies and parts |
 Flat Tree costing |
 Nested Tree costing |
Rules based costing was introduced in SOLIDWORKS 2016 for machined parts. Now in 2017, this can be applied to sheet metal parts as well. I’ll take the side of this support frame I’m working on. I’m using a custom template from VF Metal Cutters.
 Sheet metal piece |
Launching the Template Editor lets me add rules or view them. I created a rule that adds the custom operation of Anodize if 6061 Alloy is chosen for the material.
 Custom operation rule |
Since I had the material set to Steel, there’s no Anodize in the cost. But if I change it to 6061 Alloy, it’s added.
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Cost with steel as the material
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Cost with aluminum as the material
Now that I’ve costed this part, it’s time to generate the report. The next enhancement that I want to highlight is that now you can show up to 5 alternate quantities on your reports to easily see how lot size affects the price. I’ll use 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250. Once I generate the report, there is a section where it shows the different quantities.
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Going back to templates, the last enhancement that I want to point out is you now have the option of going to MySolidWorks for custom templates provided by suppliers. This is set to be available in Service Pack 2, so keep an eye out for that, but promises to be a way to get supplier information for pricing your designs.
 MySOLIDWORKS template integration |
In this article, I went over some key enhancements for Costing in SOLIDWORKS 2017. For more information, check out our YouTube channel or contact us at Hawk Ridge Systems today. Thanks for reading!
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