Innovative heuristic quotation system for aerospace, automotive, defence and industrial equipment sector.

Currently, making a manufacturing quotation presents a number of difficulties: consumption of man-hours to create the offer, sometimes, it represents the 70% of the pre-sale costs, the need for expert personnel with experience in manufacturing technology, variability of the final quotation depending on the personnel making the offer, the customer, the commercial period, the price of the raw materials, etc. different input information formats according to the client. Given the increasingly reduced lead time for suppliers in these sectors and the large volume of changes that large Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) often require from them, the need to make this process more efficient and achieve automation is a very important objective for European industry to compete against areas with cheap labour. In this context, this Spanish SME has developed an advanced technology that facilitates the quotation of the parts in an automatic method, providing in a fast and reliable way relevant data for the purchasing / engineering / pre-sales areas. The company has developed a product cost management (PMC) solution. In particular, this tool is specific for estimating manufacturing cost. These types of solutions are part of what is defined as product life-cycle management (PLM). This technology allows to compare different parameters when it comes to make a quotation of every piece, moreover it has a text recognition module that allows automatic generation of quotations, through the automatic recognition of the critical parameters of each of the pieces. It incorporates a solution that notifies the client each time there is an anomaly in the quotation of the parts, analysing with big data and data mining the different variables involved in the generation of the quotations. The supply chain of the automotive and aerospace sectors are the most sensitive to the costs generated at this stage, due to price competitiveness and lack of knowledge of the costs incurred in tackling these activities. These product cost management (PCM) solutions are not available for most of the SMEs (suppliers, manufacturers) required to use a big amount of hours/employee to carry out these quotations which may or may not result in a possible turnover or development. The targeted sectors of this product cost management (PCM) solution are: automotive, aerospace, defense and industrial equipment. Additionally, it is targeted at: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), suppliers and engineering companies. •SMEs which cannot make large operational expenditures (OPEX) investments in product cost management (PCM) tool licenses and pre-sales costs in bid management will create a bottleneck and reduce the efficiency of their production. •Large companies that can use it either to reduce structural costs (administrative or purchase/pre-sale staff) or that want to speed up the product cost calculation process in the design and development phase, streamline the management of quotations in case of a high volume of requests, and reduce costs due to competitive pressure. Within the consolidation phase of this innovative system, the company is looking for international testers willing to collaborate, after the certification of the platform, under commercial agreement with technical assistance.