Estimating tools to support multipath agility in electronics manufacturing

The changing needs of the modern customer are driving electronics manufacturing systems to produce smaller quantities of identical products, put with a higher level of customization. The increased customization, and the subsequent adoption of concurrent engineering practices driven by the significance of the product time-to-market and compounded by the distributed nature of enterprises, makes it very difficult to accurately estimate the product manufacturing cost and the cycle time for new products. The importance of these measures has only increased with the smaller profit margins that are typical in today's highly competitive markets. The increasing levels of intangible factors whose effects are difficult to quantify, such as the in-house information and communication systems, and that substantially affect these measures has also made the task of estimating these more involved. This paper discusses conceptual methodologies to address the issues of cost and cycle time estimation in an agile manufacturing environment.