Annual Enterprise PCB Tool TCO: Build a Model from Your Own Data

Annual PCB tool budgeting needs a common boundary: which teams, boards, services and release activities are included? Use the same boundary when evaluating Altium, Cadence, Siemens or an automation-assisted workflow. Vendor names alone do not define equivalent configurations.

Build the annual baseline

Collect annual software and support commitments, board volume, active engineering hours, loaded labor rates and relevant rework costs. Separate one-time migration work from recurring operations. Allocate shared infrastructure consistently, and include existing CAD licenses when they remain necessary after automation is added.

Annual active labor cost = board count × measured hours per board × loaded hourly rate.

Use representative board classes if complexity varies significantly. Avoid multiplying the same project hours by headcount: if 160 hours is already the whole team's effort on a board, it is counted once.

A hypothetical sensitivity model

Assume 20 boards per year at 160 active hours each and $140/hour. Baseline labor is 20 × 160 × $140 = $448,000. If the recorded normal effort excludes rework and a separate 20% rework allowance is justified, labor becomes $537,600. Do not add that allowance when rework is already included in the 160 hours.

For illustration only, a 15% reduction in the $537,600 labor total represents $80,640 of capacity; a 25% reduction represents $134,400. Neither percentage is a measured Quilter result. Subtract actual incremental service, integration, training and verification costs before reporting net benefit. Include a zero-improvement case as well.

Use comparable commercial inputs

Request quotes for the same deployment, support level and required features. Public prices may refer to different products, regions or contract terms. Quilter's current pricing uses a project model based on pins to route. Estimate annual automation spend from the planned projects and actual quotes, not an invented seat price or export cap.

Check the result against operations

• Can the released capacity be used on funded work?
• Does the change reduce external spending or only redistribute salaried time?
• Are review, integration and retraining costs fully included?
• Does the pilot cover the board classes in the annual forecast?
• What happens if fewer projects are delivered or the expected effort improvement does not occur?

Keep schedule value and possible future revenue in a separate scenario. Review the forecast against actual costs and accepted designs each quarter. This makes the annual TCO model a budgeting tool rather than a claim that one platform always costs less.