## 5 Economic Analysis  
The aim of this section is to understand the financial impact of choosing CM or AM routes to tooling fabrications, which is done with a time and cost breakdown for labour and machines for each step. All of the data for each step presented in the previous Figures 2 and 3 were collected. All costs and prices refer to the Danish market. The labour rate is considered to be 650 DKK/h, so a round figure of 88 \(\upxi\)/h is used (1 \(\upxi\) = 7.4 DKK). For cost calculation, the AM step is divided into four phases: preparation, setup, build, and removal. * The _preparation_ phase includes the time required to prepare the CAD design and for job preparation, which takes an average of 2 h, depending on the complexity of the design. This phase is thus estimated to cost 176 \(\upxi\);
* The _setup_ costs include the machine preparation time, addition of powder, and other general manual preparation, which takes an average of 1 h. The machine then needs to start heating up the build plate and remove the oxygen from the chamber, which will also take approximately 1 h. The AM machine hourly rate needs to be considered for this step and, for a relatively old (\(\approx\)10 years) and robust machine (including its depreciation), the final cost is of 55 \(\upxi\)/h. Thus, the cost of this phase is 143 \(\upxi\);
* The _build_ phase needs 54 h for printing the test insert, at the same hourly rate calculated previously. The electricity consumption cost (based on Danish industrial electricity) is 0.0688 \(\upxi\)/h, with machine consumption being 3.23 kWh. It is required now to consider the product: the mass of the geometry calculated from the volume of the insert and the density of the material (8100 kg/m\({}^{3}\)) is multiplied by the cost per kilo of the powder (88 \(\upxi\)/kg). The final price of 3392 \(\upxi\) is derived by multiplying and summing all of the costs involved;
* The final _removal_ phase includes cutting of the parts from the build plate, cleaning leftover powder, and the removal of supports. Overall, it takes approximately 2 h. The heat treatment takes 48 h. The furnace consumption is 15 kWh at the same energy cost. Summing all the activities and costs, the final price is 225 \(\upxi\). All conventional processes also need to be considered for the CM flow, as well as for the finishing of the AM chain, which uses only five-axis CNC. The machine costs used here are approximations calculated from the external hourly rate for one hour of milling (approximately 101.35 \(\upxi\)/h). It is important to consider the cutting tool costs, i.e., drill bits,  
Figure 9: Resource statistics simulation for the AM workflow. The number of inserts produced in one year is 589.  
required to manufacture the inserts. For the three-axis CNC, three tools are required, each costing 402 \(\upupup\), plus a drill bit set of 134 \(\upupup\). An important aspect to consider is how many times the tools are changed per insert produced. Mold makers prefer to change the tools as often as possible, in order to ensure the highest quality of the products. This means that a set of tools can be used to manufacture one or two inserts only. If each set of tools is used for two inserts, then the final figure for tools' costs for three-axis manufacturing is 675.68 \(\upupup\). A similar calculation was performed for the five-axis machine operations, which require five tools that each cost 402 \(\upupup\), with the final price being 103,151 \(\upupup\). An extra cost of 402 \(\upupup\) needs to be added for the CM manufacturing flow to take into account the price of the initial block of steel. Given the processing time reported in Table 1, the final costs are 4193 \(\upupup\) for the AM finishing steps and 8017 \(\upupup\) for the full CM production stream. The two products (made with the AM and CM process chain, respectively) converged at this point, and not relevant cost variation can be found for the last steps of the chain.