Maximum Product (System) Effectiveness for Specified Cost

The present emphasis is on product (system) effectiveness or overall performance and total costs of a product, including costs of development, ownership, and obsolescence. This concept of product value highlights the need to identify and clarify the interrelationships of the acquisition, use, and maintenance elements to achieve product or system requirements within cost limits. The problem is to recognize and assess all the significant elements for trade-offs and to establish the interrelationships with the necessary clarity and visibility for decision making.

A product effectiveness program with cost constraints utilizes a basic approach:

1. 1.
   Defining product purpose and use goals, and applying fixed constraints, such as costs, schedules, and skills.
2. 2.
   Development and utilization of a checklist to help assure inclusion of all product effectiveness factors, using experience and analysis data.
3. 3.
   A management system using check points to monitor and incrementally verify programs toward the established goals, and to modify methods and technology through trade-offs to attain these goals.
4. 4.
   Contracts or other customer/producer agreements designed to provide flexibility and responsiveness within prescribed boundaries for changes required to attain the product effectiveness requirements.