Conditions for and development of an information technology-support tool for manufacturing cost calculations and analyses
Collecting data on manufacturing performance and making the results known to those involved could support efforts to improve manufacturing processes. This article describes the conditions for and development of manufacturing cost software developed for analysing connections between manufacturing performance parameters and economic parameters. The conditions for the software were investigated in two pre-studies. The first found that there are commercial software products for manufacturing data collection that support the collection of the data needed for the applied model. The second study demonstrated that the manufacturing companies participating in the second study were largely able to collect the needed data. The developed software, preliminary in character and needing further development, provides information on how the manufacturing performance of a company affects its manufacturing costs. It takes account of six categories of manufacturing cost. A what-if section is included, making it possible to alter the values of various parameters that affect costs in order to analyse how the part cost of a certain component changes with the use of new parameter values compared with historic values.
cost analysis cost improvement performance measures manufacturing management