Patent ID: 7647130

Claim:
A method in a computer system for predicting a completion time for manufacturing a particular configuration of a product, the method comprising: receiving, at a data processing system, an order to manufacture the configuration of the product; identifying, by a processing unit of the data processing system, a plurality of activities that must be finished in order to completely manufacture the configuration, wherein each activity in the plurality of activities has one or more associated rules for calculating a predicted cycle time for an activity; calculating, by the processing unit, an initial predicted completion time by adding historical cycle times for each activity in the plurality of activities; responsive to completion of an activity in the plurality of activities, determining, by the processing unit, an actual amount of time the activity took to complete; predicting, by the processing unit, an amount of time that it will take incomplete activities of the plurality of activities to complete using the actual amount of time the completed activity took to complete and the one or more associated rules for calculating a predicted cycle time for an activity; recalculating, by the processing unit, the initial predicted completion time using the actual amount of time of the completed activity and the predicted amount of time of the incomplete activities to form a recalculated prediction time that it will take to manufacture the configuration; and reporting, by the processing unit, the recalculated prediction completion time as the configuration of the product is being manufactured.