After a successful delivery to its primary customers Systecon (UK) Limited are now able to offer a new and flexible Whole Life Cost Tool (WLC) tool CATLOC (Calculation and Analysis Tool for Logistics and Operational Costs).

Whole Life Cost is a well established method used in systems engineering, for procurement and other assessment activities where it is of interest to estimate and compare costs for development / acquisition, operation, support and disposal during the whole life of a system.

Primary uses of whole life cost are:

• comparison of system design alternatives
• comparison of logistics concepts
• identification of cost drivers
• long term planning and budgeting
• selection among competing contractors
• decisions about replacement of ageing equipment
• cost monitoring of active programmes

CATLOC accommodates all the primary uses of Whole Life Cost. As different studies may require different LCC models, CATLOC allows the WLC model to be defined by the user. This allows the cost breakdown to follow a predefined standard model or for the user to specify their own. To simplify the effort of building, editing and tailoring a WLC model, a set of default models is supplied.

Central features of the tool are:

• user-defined WLC models
• ease and flexibility to produce different cost breakdown structures
• standard WLC model templates provided
• ability to save and reuse WLC model structures
• flexible graphical result views to improve analysis and interpretation of results
• powerful support of data defaults to gradually improve model accuracy rather than enforcing detailed parameter values up-front
• management and comparison of several input data sets in parallel
• efficient and flexible import and export of data
• sensitivity analyses

The five dimensional nature of CATLOC's data model makes it possible to slice the cost aggregates in any relevant way, including the distribution of costs over time. CATLOC has a very similar user interface to OPUS10^TM and SIMLOX.

CATLOC is a uniquely flexible tool that can be interfaced not only to existing Systecon products but also to existing databases using standard ODBC drivers. This approach significantly reduces the cost of a toolset as existing software, databases and data can be re-used thus avoiding additional investment.

More details on CATLOC will appear soon. Follow the links for definitions of Whole Life Cost - WLC and LCC - Life Cycle Cost

Whole Life Cost CATLOC Technical Brochure [67KB]
CATLOC Management Brochure [39KB]
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