Cost-effective improvement during development of advanced manufacturing processes

Defense acquisition programs are plagued by cost over-runs and extended development times. The root cause of many of these problems is a lack of adequate tools to evaluate the impact on cost and schedule of different choices of characteristics, designs, materials, manufacturing processes and suppliers. In this proposal, we are extending an existing enterprise-wide costing software framework to support the collaborative costing needs across the supply chain of a major missile development program with aggressive cost goals. In Phase I we analyzed the user requirements and designed the use cases, workflows, data dictionary, and integration methods to complementary software systems. In Phase II, we will 1) Integrate with project planning to trade-off development and manufacturing cost, and cost and schedule. 2) Integrate with requirements management tools to drive the cost models. 3) Integrate to a trade-space evaluation framework to support cost and performance tradeoffs 4) Develop cost collaboration support and proprietary data & model security. 5) Demonstrate the software for cost and performance trades on a critical missile sub-system. To support the program with cost analysis outside of what is necessary to demonstrate the software, we have added an option for cost analysis support. In addition, there is an option for integration to manufacturing planning and simulation tools.