Tool change quotes, with the steel work, the trial and the new piece price in one draft.

A customer's engineer adds a rib, opens up a hole, asks for a new insert, a different texture or a gate in another spot, and sends a new drawing revision with a request for price and timing. Your program manager has to find what changed, get the tool room or toolmaker to look, plan a trial, work out what the customer will want to see before it accepts parts again, and decide whether the piece price moves, then send it all back as one answer.

In the proof of concept, AI works through copies of changes you already quoted and drafts the toolmaker request and the customer quote line by line. Every trial and inspection rate traces to your own sheets, and every tool price comes from the toolmaker quote you send. Whatever the drawing leaves unclear becomes a question for the customer, not a guess.

Which way the steel moves. Moldmakers call a change "steel safe" when it only takes metal out of the mold. Molding design guides put it plainly: removing metal from an existing mold is relatively easy, and adding it back can be difficult. A thicker wall or a smaller hole usually means cutting steel; a thinner wall or a bigger hole means adding it back, by welding, a new insert or a new cavity. The draft compares the two revisions and marks each changed feature as plastic added or removed, so your toolmaker sees which changes take steel out. Whether and how a change gets made is the toolmaker's call.

Welds and textures add lines. MoldMaking Technology noted long ago that a welded area's different hardness gives a different texture depth, and that stainless weld, popular because it flows well, is the worst choice under a texture; a texturing shop wrote there in 2024 that a weld is often undetectable until the texture goes on. So adding steel in a textured or polished area usually brings re-texturing or polishing, often from an outside shop. A new or deeper texture needs draft: a common design rule adds 1.5 degrees for every 0.001 in. of texture depth, so a texture callout on a wall with little draft becomes a question for your toolmaker.

Gates and hot runners bring in more suppliers. Moving a gate changes how the part fills and where the gate mark sits, so a cosmetic part may need the customer to accept the new spot. On a hot runner tool, the hot runner supplier usually provides drawings while the moldmaker does the plates and machining, as a MoldMaking Technology article on hot runner molds describes, so one gate move can mean two quotes and two lead times. The draft names every supplier a change reaches and leaves each price blank until their quote is in.

The trial and the requalification. Shops number trials differently: one quality forum thread lists T1 as the first trial for dimensions, T2 for corrections and T3 for appearance, while others count from T0. The draft uses your names, prices press time, setup, material and inspection from your rates, and lists the requalification the customer's terms ask for, such as a dimensional report on the changed features or new samples for approval. ISO 13485:2016 expects device makers, as applicable, to have suppliers agree in writing to report a change before making it (clause 7.4.2), so a medical customer's agreement may hold the tool until its approval is in writing.

Who pays, and the piece price. One molder's published terms, Franz Morat's, include a single sampling run in the mold price, leave changes the customer starts outside it, pass ownership to the customer once the mold is paid for, and cover wear from normal use within the agreed life. Your agreements will differ, so the draft reads them: who owns the tool, whether the change goes on a tooling PO or into the piece price, and whether it is the customer's change or upkeep you owe. If the part weight changes, the piece price line uses the new weight your engineer gives and your resin list, and leaves any new cycle time to your estimator. Your reviewer, often the program manager or tool room lead, checks each line against what your team sent.

After a yes, each new engineering change gets a draft toolmaker request and customer quote as it arrives, for about 30 days.

Your program manager gets the toolmaker's answer, fills the tool lines, checks every other line and decides what goes back. No steel is cut and no quote reaches a customer on a draft's say-so, and the scoring table stays in use through the month.