Abstract:
Currently, manufacturing organisations worldwide are shifting their business
models towards Product-Service Systems (PSS), which implies the
development of new support agreements such as availability-based contracts.
This transition is shifting the responsibilities for managing and resolving
obsolescence issues from the customer to the prime contractor and industry
work share partners. This new scenario has triggered a new need to estimate
the Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) cost of resolving obsolescence issues at
the bidding stage, so it can be included in the support contract. Hence, the aim
of this research is to develop an understanding about all types of obsolescence
and develop methodologies for the estimation of NRE costs of hardware
(electronic, electrical and electromechanical (EEE) components and materials)
obsolescence that can be used at the bidding stage for support contracts in the
defence and aerospace sectors.
For the accomplishment of this aim, an extensive literature review of the related
themes to the research area was carried out. It was found that there is a lack of
methodologies for the cost estimation of obsolescence, and also a lack of
understanding on the different types of obsolescence such as materials and
software obsolescence. A systematic industrial investigation corroborated these
findings and revealed the current practice in the UK defence sector for cost
estimation at the bidding stage, obsolescence management and obsolescence
cost estimation. It facilitated the development of an understanding about
obsolescence in hardware and software. Further collaboration with experts from
more than 14 organisations enabled the iterative development of the EEEFORCE
and M-FORCE frameworks, which can be used at the bidding stage of
support contracts to estimate the NRE costs incurred during the contracted
period in resolving obsolescence issues in EEE components and materials,
respectively. These frameworks were implemented within a prototype software
platform that was applied to 13 case studies for expert validation.
