WHEN COSTS FROM BEING A CONSTRAINT BECOME A DRIVER FOR CONCEPT GENERATION

The ability of addressing global competitive environments is highly determined by quality, costs and time to market. Moreover, focusing on customer is becoming so important that companies have to take into account even the costs that a customer sustain during the product usage, being them extremely important in his purchasing decision. Therefore, manufacturers more and more are forced to reduce not only the costs that directly determine the price of the product, but they must evaluate also those costs that affect the entire lifecycle. Despite the recognized importance of product lifecycle into literature, none of the present cost estimation methods proposes actual proper solutions. The paper hence suggests a methodology that aim to fill this gap in literature by integrating qualitative information usually available since the beginning of the process with quantitative data derived from lifecycle operations. The proposed method was developed and validated within an automotive company that produce instrumentation for engine development.