Life Cycle Costing in Manufacturing Process Management

In the last two decades during which the competitive business environment increased, it became crucial for each company to find the most accurate strategy to make survive its business. For that reason they need to manage and control their costs. Life Cycle Costing is one of these tools, which helps to analyse the cost of a product in the whole life of a product. To be competitive, the organisations have to optimize not only their products but also all their processes. Manufacturing Process Management (MPM) addresses the area between product design and production. Therefore MPM supports to optimize the manufacturing area of a factory. With different virtual scenarios the best solution of the manufacturing process can be obtained and at the same time it is possible to reduce time to market, costs and increase the quality. The focus of this paper is to integrate Life Cycle Costing tools and methods in the MPM part of the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). We will discuss the implementation of Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) methods in a PLM tool for an early design decision support.