Framework of a Product Lifecycle Costing System

Today’s competitive business environment imposes new challenges to manufacturing companies. For these companies to survive in this environment, implementing product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies with an emphasis on cost control is one valid approach. PLM is a strategic business approach that applies a consistent set of business solutions to help manufacturing companies manage all the activities related to a product in an integrated way across the lifecycle from customer need to product recycling and disposal. Product lifecycle cost is an important measure for PLM implementation. It can help track and analyze the financial information of activities associated with each phase of a product’s lifecycle. The paper presents a framework of the product lifecycle costing system for supporting decision making, especially the decision making at very early stages of a product lifecycle. It can be used as a design support tool to help new product development. A number of methodologies and tools are developed in the system. The case based reasoning method is used to quickly build a new product model. The costs of product development processes related to the new product are calculated using activity based costing methods. Dynamic programming is then used to obtain an optimal set of product development processes with the objective of optimizing the overall product development cost. This system is built using object oriented modeling methods.