Controlling the design process for minimal life cycle cost

This paper focuses on the area between design and management. This area is critical, because during the design phase many decisions are made that strongly influence the manufacturing process and thus finally the price. A continuous source of tension is the fact that engineers and managers sport different ways of approaching their work: Managers think in processes, whereas engineers prefer thinking in structural hierarchies. In this paper we describe the design process and, as an example, a standard management approach. Further on, we de-scribe a set of cost factors that finally go into the cost models that allow a cost estimation at an early design stage. At the end of the paper, we present a tool that is capable of dealing with cost estimations based on imprecise data, which are typical for the design phase of a product´s life.