Whole Life Costing
The third meeting of the INCOSE UK Bristol Local Group took place
on Wednesday 23rd February 2005, when 18 delegates battled their way
through snow-covered weather forecasts to enjoy two talks on
Through-life Costing. And two very different views they were, too.
The first, by Terry Skedgell (the Programme Manager for
"Acquisition for Network Enabled Capability " at the MOD on
secondment from Augusta Westland)told of developments in the defence
contracting stance and the way Systems Engineering will need to
become even more prominent to respond to it: thinking laterally and
costing modularly. He reminded us that a supplier who delivers a
product on time might view it as a success, but a customer who
cannot deploy that product might be less enamoured. The presentation
is available for
download
(ppt, 614kB).
The second, by Rob Marsh (Research Fellow in the aerospace
manufacturing research centre at UWE) told of work emanating from a
project with Airbus and Rolls-Royce, to build a re-usable cost-model
structure primarily aimed at the product manufacturing part of the
life-cycle. He stressed the benefits of modelling across the
spectrum of granularity and conciseness in
order to provide timely estimates for trade-off studies. The
presentation is available for
download
(ppt, 185kB).
The next meeting, on April 27th, was planned to be a visit to
Concorde but, due to old age, he is not allowed out on dark nights
and so this has been postponed until the summer. Do not despair,
the Committee has more ideas. Watch the web-site for details.
Bob Dale |
