Stock market related pricing mechanisms for the tool and mould manufacturing industry

Tool and mould manufacturers typically prepare their quotations and tenders in response to customers’ requests. The ability to provide an accurate price of, for example, a die casting mould is a key competitive factor for such companies. However, particularly in the customised production area, calculating the quotations and tenders has been proven as extremely challenging and subjective matter. One main cause is that time dynamic costs are rarely taken into consideration sufficiently even though they have a major impact on the final quotation due to the large time frame between the moment of the initial quotation and the actual production start. They neglect can lead to a significant discrepancy of up to 40 percent between pre- and post-calculation and thus to a loss of the corporate added value.

A novel method developed at the Institute of Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW), Leibniz Universität Hannover, aims to provide a framework which allows tool and mould manufacturer to prepare a more precise and reliable quotation by taking time-dependent dynamic costs into consideration. The prediction of the time dynamic costs takes place by using stock market pricing mechanisms. Subsequently, based on enterprise related knowledge aggregation, this method also accounts for the probability of occurrence of each quotation thereby minimising the discrepancy between the pre- and post-calculation.