I have some 200 parts to be drafted using solidworks 2016. I want to calculate the time required for drafting these parts depending on their detailing. Can anyone tell me what methods they follow to calculate the time period. Any examples or tips will be useful.#drafting #draftingtime mechanical drafting
Thomas,
This is a good idea to apply correction factor to the drawings for estimation.
Although, apart from this, I wanted to know the correlation between the no. of features vs drafting time. If there is a way to know this correlation then we can get a good estimate.
In my part list, there are parts with 2 bends and some other with heavy features.
Even harder to get a correlation on number of features. Depending on how you modelled it, a 3 feature part and a 30 feature part could take exactly the same time by virtue of using Insert Model Items to dimension the drawing.
I think it is very hard to be objective in calculating time needed.
It depends on your SW skill as well as your skill and experience in estimating time needed.
I know of a leader who asked different people how long they would estimate a SW task would take, and then compared this with actual time. Of cause it took different time dependent on SW skill, but the error in estimating was surprisingly consistent. If person A was 20% faster than he himself estimated, he would always be around 20% faster.
The leader would then calculate the actual time by applying corrections to the estimates.
Perhaps you could use this in your project. First make a quick estimate of the time needed for all 200 parts. Then do one or two of them and calculate your correction factor and apply it to the total time.