Acquisition and Life Cycle Management

Acquisition and life cycle management begins with concept definition and continues throughout all phases of a systems life.  Key to life cycle management is a thorough definition of the system requirements resulting in a detailed definition of all tasks in a master schedule for development, fielding, and operation of the system, including its interfaces to other existing or future systems.  Using the master schedule of tasks, detailed estimates of all costs to develop, field, operate and support a system are developed and updated periodically.  These cumulative total of the yearly costs are the Total Ownership Cost (TOC).  TOC is the sum of all costs of a system from its initiation as a concept until it is retired from operation and completes decommissioning and disposal.  These costs include program office costs, acquisition and modification costs, and operating and product support costs.  The funds may be expended by a Government agency or contractor and subcontractors.  The accuracy of the cost information over a long time period is only as good as the data collected and input into some set of records that truly represent all of the cost elements for each time period.  Actual cost data is generally lacking or reported only as a total cost with no breakdown into labor, benefits, overhead, materials, and costs such as the fuel, utilities, telecommunications, and software support.  Determination of the TOC of an existing system to form a baseline provides a metric for use in evaluating alternatives or upgrades to the present system that could improve capability, or reduce total ownership cost compared to the current system configuration.

Key Benefits

• Life cycle systems engineering provides the detailed definition of tasks, schedules, risks, and costs for the life of a system.

• Total Ownership Cost identifies all items contributing to the system cost and is used to rank cost drivers from high to low.  This provides the information needed to focus on implementing cost reduction to lower the costs of the highest cost drivers.

• Periodic updates to the historical TOC provides tracking of costs as they are incurred and permits determining if the cost reductions are working, as well as improving the forecast of future operating and support costs.

Capabilities

Life Cycle Systems Engineering

Life cycle systems engineering provides the baseline of a system and the basis for determination of the capability (performance and availability), and costs (acquisition and operating and product support).  Life cycle systems engineering ensures that a system is designed so that it can be upgraded at an affordable cost to improve its capability by insertion of new technology and reduce it operating and support costs.

Determination of Total Ownership Cos

Total ownership cost for an existing system is determined from historical and current data.  These data are collected from various sources ranging from paper records to many different data files that represent data entered into different computer programs and systems.  We collect these data and develop a data warehouse that can be queried using tools such as Microsoft® Access and SQL Server™.  As a member of the Microsoft Partner Program, we can tailor the presentation of the TOC output to your preference, whether visual, graphs, or tables.  We also provide you the capability to view your updated costs, and trends in those costs.