Virtual Cost Engineering Studio will provide more accurate and timely cost estimates within the European manufacturing industries

Enabling organisations to calculate more accurate costs per unit of their new products already at the start of the research and development phase will raise their competitiveness significantly.

Enabling organisations to calculate more accurate costs per unit of their new products already at the start of the research and development phase will raise their competitiveness significantly. 25% less time will be needed for those cost estimates related to the status quo according to Dr Roy of Cranfield University, the technical leader of the project. That’s the goal of the V-CES (Virtual Cost Engineering Studio) project which is funded by the European Commission[1] and which is currently executed by a European wide consortium consisting of:

• IZET in Germany, co-ordinating the project
• Cranfield University in UK, one of the worlds leader in Engineering Cost Estimating and with a strong background in the aerospace industry, technically leading the project
• Centre Ricerche FIAT in Italy, the research centre of FIAT
• PRICE Systems of UK, world leader in Parametric Cost Estimating
• DAS in Germany, state-of-the-art abatement systems provider for the Semiconductor industry

V-CES will provide a varity of net based as well as offline services in order to support SMEs in achieving their goals, for holistic and efficient Cost Estimates, a best practice center and training in the different Cost Engineering methods, as parametric, bottom-up or analogy based techniques. V-CES will also provide the opportunity to participate in online training workshops.

After a successful internal evaluation, all services will be made available for external testing and evaluation in the domain of aerospace, automotive and semiconductor equipment by July 2005.

More information about the V-CES project and Cost Engineering, as well as how to become a test user and qualify for the reduced lifetime friendship fees for the professional service can be found at www.V-CES.com, or contact Mr. Lars Hansen (Hansen@izet.de).

[1]

Project name: Virtual Cost Engineering Studio]

Project Acronym: V-CES]

Call Identifier: FP6-2002-IST-NMP-1]

Contract No.: 507041]

Project type: Specific Support Action (SSA)

Start date: 2004-07-01]

Duration: 24 months]