Within product development, manufacturing cost estimation provides a sound basis for design and management decisions. This secures companies profitability, but the effort is high and deep knowledge at the interface of design, manufacturing and costs is needed. These issues can be eased with automation enabled by semantic technologies. Therefore, the authors developed a method for reference-based manufacturing cost estimation and created a prototype. This research evaluates the method and the prototype. Observation, interview and questionnaire were conducted with ten experienced cost engineers at a large German manufacturing company.

Based on its results, the study shows the methods contribution to lower estimation effort, while the impact on transparency and the knowledge base was only partly verified. The method steps show different automation potential, so an incremental automation should be considered. Even though semantic technologies show high potential for identifying reference system elements in this study, the limiting factor for automation in manufacturing cost estimation remains the low availability of product and manufacturing information and missing knowledge of its connection within product development.