Manufacturing cost contingency management: Part B application and validation

Abstract

The key aim of the presented work is to provide validated evidence of a manufacturing cost contingency management approach. However, the work is split into two papers due to the length with Part a) addressing methodology and Part b) addressing the application and validation. It was shown in Part a) that a truly concurrent engineering approach can be established by capturing a mixture of knowledge from the design, manufacturing and procurement functional areas, and putting it in a form that can be automatically accessed with no specialist manufacturing knowledge, thus enabling the company to quickly estimate their designs based on actual company manufacturing capability and associated cost contingency. This Part b) of the paper presents the use-case study which estimated the rolled-up assembly time for a thin-walled stiffened structure to be within 7% of the actual recorded value. A rolled-up accuracy of ± 10% was indicative in terms of total part and assembly cost, although it was evident that some of the individual deltas deviated more significantly, tending to cancel each other out in the roll-up. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.