many mold project engineers usually meet a problem like how to quickly provide an accurate mold quotation to our customer when they get a mold quotation inquiry, it is a big problem, because as the mold industry grows, it’s competition intensifies, accurate mold costing and quick response to a quotation inquiry become a critical step in this engineering tooling industry, voluminous studies are available in the literature on cost estimation. They can be grouped into four types of cost estimation approaches: direct, empirical, item by item, and template:

1) Direct estimation basically depends on the experience of the estimator, the estimate can vary widely.
2) the empirical approach is limited to a specific product type in each trade.
3) the item by item approach usually takes too long time to estimate. As the customer often expects a turnaround time of several hours for a quotation.
4) the template approach is built on sufficient data collected from successful deployment of the other three approaches.
Therefore, the practice of each approach only has acquired limited success in the mold industry.