JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #113 - June 2017 - 25

Integrating design and costing

Fig. 2: RTM
process model
and evaluations

is limited and the products and respective
production scenarios are often not designed
to their full potential.
In general, tools for composite part and process design are state of the art, while various
solutions are available for cost calculation
of parts, including material and operating
costs. However, the flow of information
between the development and costing departments is rarely collaborative due to
circumstances such as the high complexity
of development processes, time pressure
in development processes, different standards of knowledge or the lack of systems
and software to enhance communication.
Consequently, the direct and early cost estimation of a potential part production is
usually not carried out in an optimal way
in present composite design processes.
However, the combination of these tools
holds huge cost saving potential due to early
economic evaluations with barely no limitations to creativity in the design phase.
Seamless calculation environment for
costing-driven innovations
To enhance cost transparency throughout
the product development phase without
limiting the creativity and inspiration of
part designers, it is necessary to support the
responsible engineers and costing experts in
their communication and workflow. Good

communication between the responsible
departments results in shorter processing
times for single work packages with decreasing errors due to less misunderstandings
and higher motivation of the involved disciplines, finally leading to faster project execution and a high innovation potential.
Part design and costing tools can be combined in a platform software. Conbility
GmbH offers a software for process, job and
product costing, Oplysis, which was developed in close collaboration with the AZL of
RWTH Aachen University to ensure added
value for cost estimation and calculation in
the composite industry. It is embedded in a
platform of engidesk GmbH that helps the
user to intuitively set up production processes, allocate resources to specific processes
and calculate production cost and capacities
in a short time. The platform comes with a
drag-and-drop interface to visually support
design, production and costing experts
when building up production scenarios
and adapt changes for product and process
variations easily in real-time during team
meetings. Advanced features, such as sensitivity analysis or scale-up analysis, identify cost drivers and bottlenecks and outline
an existing production scenario to a larger
scale with all the necessary investments. An
overview of a typical RTM process model
and the corresponding evaluation features

is shown in Figure 2. A collaborative, cloudbased database is integrated to store, exchange and reuse the users' expertise.
With this unique workflow, costing can be
performed in an inspiring, "what you see
is what you get" manner, independently of
the complexity of the respective product or
process and in-depth knowledge of costing.
For example, the cost calculation of parts in
the automotive industry in terms of quote
generation is often complex due to the high
variant diversity, irregularly changing number of parts due to customer requirements,
high cost pressure and short time-to-market/customer requirements. The need for
flexibility during the quote generation is
enormous, not only in the costing department but also in the development, engineering and production departments. Every
change of order needs to be discussed, evaluated and recalculated iteratively with all
the responsible departments within a short
time. Therefore, the same level of understanding of the part, process and customer
requirements is necessary. Oplysis encourages not only the costing department to
recalculate, but also the development, engineering and production departments to
input their expertise into a single holistic
system.
Because the costing software can be connected to other calculation tools, Oplysis

No113 June 2017

/ jec composites magazine

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of JEC COMPOSITES MAGAZINE - Issue #113 - June 2017