anufacturers must frequently generate up to five times more quotes to land jobs, making the need to understand machine time, material and labor costs more important than ever.

Creating accurate quotes is a serious challenge for manufacturers, says Valter Bonelli, director of product management business systems for SigmaTEK Systems LLC. “Only a few factors have a bigger impact on a company than the ability to predict costs. It can be difficult to sell products and services if they are priced too high, but we find that manufacturers tend to set prices too low. So the question becomes, how do they find balance?”

To help fabricators respond, SigmaTEK has introduced a new job quoting tool called SigmaQUOTE. The company’s team of mathematicians and engineers has taken a singular approach to giving manufacturers tools that can provide an accurate picture of their operations from material sourcing to product deliveries.

Unlike horizontal ERP systems that are designed to serve a variety of industries, SigmaTEK Systems spent more than two decades developing vertical CAD/CAM nesting, material optimization and manufacturing process enhancement software for the particular needs of metalformers and fabricators.

No sacrifices

SigmaNEST delivers optimal material usage and nesting effi ciency. “It allows a manufacturer to make the most effective use of raw materials and manpower so it can grow its bottom line without sacrificing quality,” says Bonelli.

SigmaMRP, the company’s resource planning system, integrates with SigmaNEST and other business systems to manage transactions, customer, supplier and inventory data from one location.

SigmaQUOTE is the next step in its evolution to help people manage whole organizations. The new quoting tool—paired with CAD/CAM nesting software and powered by SigmaMRP’s accounting system—is “the perfect intersection between technology and vertical management software.” Bonelli claims.

“To understand pricing, you need knowledge,” he continues. “You need to understand the cost of what you are producing from material and equipment to manpower. Consider a piece of L-shaped steel. You can eyeball the weight at 10 lbs., but you are cutting it from rectangular sheet. We help you to determine the minimum rectangular box you can put around that L-shape. If you have two L-shapes, you can nest them, and the software will pinpoint the nested cost. CAD/CAM helps you understand material consumption and predict cutting time. Combine that with resource planning and an integrated quoting tool and you can follow your entire operation from quoting to invoicing.”

Bonelli, who was originally part of SigmaTEK’s Italian business, says, “I relocated to the U.S. office to manage a new division focused on integrating the company’s different software packages and apps to work together seamlessly.”

In addition to its quoting tool, the fruit of those efforts can be seen in SigmaTEK’s newly released Version 20 portfolio, which features new products and modules along with significant improvements to existing applications.

The new SigmaTEK launcher gives users a common, customizable desktop platform to easily access programs and view social media updates about news releases, trade shows and webinars. New nesting capabilities include setting part priority, nesting filler parts and mini sheets. Enhanced profiling imports parts with complex bevels and supports 3D simulation of the tool path for both parts and nests to verify a better program.

A punching combination makes laser precutting of complex threaded holes possible. With this program, an operator can automatically cut, punch and tap parts. Expanded batch commands for punch and combination machine processes is a typical example of automation features in Version 20.

True integration

Version 20 also helps manufacturers adopt Industry 4.0 and 5.0 practices. “Industry 4.0 introduced the practice of equipping machines to communicate with each other and generate data, which if collected, provided a foundation upon which to make sound business decisions,” Bonelli says. “Numbers don’t lie and this software gives you that certainty. You can run comparisons between real-time numbers and estimates, find out what is profitable and what isn’t.

“We give manufacturers tools that have been developed by the same team using the same database,” he continues. “If you don’t use the same data, your software is actually a data exchange. We use the same platform across all our applications. That’s true integration.”