9525751 Currie The goal of this project is to design a framework for an integrated management tool to quantify the costs associated with technological development at varying levels of complexity. In addition to direct costs, these costs include the unmeasured costs of lead time, training, learning, resistance to change, created bottlenecks, and quality costs, as well as the lack of a system's view from researcher to product idea and then from supplier through post-sales support. Specific cost data from previous design change experiences at three manufacturing companies will be analyzed. These and other known case studies will be used to build a general model that includes the relationships of organizational functions of a firm to total product design life cycle costs. The research should result in a preliminary Internet-based implementation for concurrent design and costing. The significance of the work will offer a general approach to estimating and tracking costs in the product design phase. The integrated cost model will be validated with empirical data to provide a firm basis upon which to develop management tools for determining appropriate design/cost tradeoffs.
