Doing More for Less with Electronic Mockups An Alternate Approach for Performing System Evaluations

Shrinking development budgets are placing increased limitations on the funding available to develop mockups or to dedicate prototype hardware needed to perform system level maintainability and manufacturability evaluations or demonstrations during a program’s development phase. Today’s budgetary environment requires supportability and producibility engineers to modify the classical evaluation approach, which used detailed and accurate mockups or prototype hardware to determine a system’s characteristics. New, creative, and more economical methods are needed. With the wide usage of computer-based design tools, and with concurrent engineering becoming a way of developmental life, new opportunities now exist. Engineering support functions now have access to the electronic databases which represent a system’s developmental architecture. Utilizing these databases, viable alternatives now exist for performing maintainability assessments using electronic, three-dimensional, colorized mockups to illustrate and represent a system’s features. This new approach can be accomplished in the early program development phase when opportunities exist to improve the design by enhancing the manufacturing and maintainability features, thereby adding value to the final product.