A Scalable “Design for Costing” Platform: A Practical Case in Ball Valves Industry

Market competitiveness forces companies to explore novel methods and tools to make the overall product development (PD) agile and flexible and to reduce time to market. Accurate and fast cost estimation during design represents one of the most promising strategic actions to achieve these goals.In this context, a knowledge-based system that analyses the 3D CAD model of the product and automatically determines the manufacturing operations is developed. It consists of a scalable platform implementing “Design for Costing” paradigm. It is actually able to recognize geometric and non-geometric features from the 3D model and its attributes and calculate the final cost as the sum of raw materials, production cycles and setting operations thanks to the application of a set of knowledge-based rules mapping manufacturing processes and modeling features. While previous research works deepened the main technological issues of system development, this paper presents a practical case in ball valves industry to illustrate a structured methodology based on systematic engineering approach to apply the platform at the different stages of the product lifecycle and to verify the reliability of the implemented rules and the efficiency of the achieved process. The obtained results are compared to the traditional PD process to calculate product costs in order to highlight the main benefits.