The calculation of an order involves considerable conflicts of objectives. On the one hand, the bid price should be as low as possible, because you don't want to stand out among your competitors with the highest price. On the other hand, one's own costs should be covered and a certain margin should remain. However, this is where the difficulties start: quite a few companies do not have an exact record of their operating and coating costs and cannot even say exactly what the actual costs of coating a square meter of a specific component are. In addition, not every price inquiry leads to an order. Accordingly, statistically the greater part of the costing work is not in vain, but for the dustbin.
Until now, it was considered largely impossible to develop a software tool for calculating coating orders that could be used by a wide variety of contracting companies and would be able to map the individual calculation rules. But a small team of courageous developers has succeeded in giving coating companies the ability to restructure the costing process, minimize the time required to do so, and make the result reproducible. Surface Solutions' Surface Wizard has now completed its trial phase and has been available to users since the beginning of the year.
Read all about the new software tool in the 3/2023 issue of Surface Technology magazine and soon online at oberflaeche.de!