Costing is not quoting.

The calculated or estimated cost has no practical relation to the quoted price for two reasons.

First, the price that will win the work relies exclusively on what the customer is willing to pay. End of story.

The customer does not care that it will cost the die shop $500,000 USD to build if they are willing to pay only $400,000 USD for the job.

Even if your costing software is accurate to +/-0.005%, a cost of anything over $400,000 USD is a loser.

Second, most die shops have no real clue as to what their geniune costs are. At the quoting level, it is guesswork.

At the historical level, the data is usually poorly tracked, collected, and reconciled. The historical data should be the baseline for future work. Without this important data, all decisions moving forward are simply guesses.

Again, even if the historical data was valid and the costing method – software or otherwise – was accurate, the only thing that matters is quoting the maximum that the customer is willing to pay and work like the devil to reduce costs once the quote becomes an order.