Hasbro · Games

Cost Estimation Tool

Problem: Give Hasbro games engineers a standard tool to make accurate board-game cost estimates in less time.
My role: Project Engineer Co-op, Hasbro (Games, Play-Doh, NERF)
Users: 4 games engineers
Tools: Excel, Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Query, SharePoint
Result: Estimates down from 1–2 hours to a few minutes; ~$100k/year in labor savings

Objective

Speed up reference costing: pricing a new board game from the costs of items in existing quotes.

Quote library: the tool reads a library of existing quotes.
Analysis: it analyzes the quote data and breaks it down into individual items.
Cost database: it uploads each item to a cost database on SharePoint.
Estimate: the engineer picks items from dropdowns, such as "deck of 52 cards" or "10 × 10 game board", and the costs fill in automatically.
The final output table is in a project-ready format to share with team members in scrum and gate meetings.
Presented the final working version to employees and leadership from multiple departments at a monthly ToyBox meeting.

All 4 games engineers used the tool. A cost estimate went from 1–2 hours to a few minutes.
How the ~$100k/year was calculated: I estimated how many hours a cost estimate used to take, then multiplied the time saved by the average number of projects per year to get the yearly labor savings.