Design Objective Functions (Value Models)

Pricer Custom Objective Function

To find the best design, your engineering team must have a way to evaluate designs, a way to measure their goodness. Of course, everyone knows that less weight, less fuel consumption, less cost and more reliability are good, but what about a design that is more reliable, consumes more fuel, weighs less and costs more? Trade factors are sometimes used to balance two properties, but to compare four or ten properties at once requires a full objective function, a mathematical expression that combines all the properties into a single measure of goodness. Furthermore, the use of formal design optimization packages such as ISIGHT requires a formal definition of value, that is, an objective function.

Pricer

To generate an objective function specific to your product, DFM developed Pricer, an engineering economic model that estimates the price and profitability of your product in terms of design parameters, such as weight, efficiency, cost and reliability. The model incorporates a rigorous representation of the market and your customers' business, including the impact of your design on their revenues and costs. Probabilistic analysis is used to address demand uncertainties. Competitors are modeled, and their relative performance drives market prices.

Pricer is flexible. It will accommodate as much or as little data as you have available. Using Microsoft Access for data entry and storage and Microsoft Excel for calculation, Pricer can easily be tailored to your application.

Pricer can run multiple scenarios, and weight the results by their likelihood. This allows you to perform rigorous probabilistic analyses of uncertain prospects.

Pricer is especially powerful for sensitivity studies. What does a one pound increase in weight do to the profitability of your product? How about a one percent improvement in efficiency? Pricer makes it easy to answer these questions.

Sensitivity results can then be used to price out research and development programs. Pricer can be used to answer questions such as, "What is it worth to my business to increase turbine inlet temperature capability by 25?F?"

Finally, Pricer is an integrated part of the developing suite of Design for the Marketplace tools, which support the entire design process, from basic research to concept to product release to revenue service.

Custom Objective Function

DFM Consulting can also develop a custom objective function for your product, working directly with your design and marketing personnel. The objective function will reflect what your customers desire in terms that your engineering team can design to.