Getting Started with Windchill Risk and Reliability > Windchill LCC > Understanding LCC Calculations
Understanding LCC Calculations
Windchill LCC enables you to compute costs based on the entire product lifecycle, from inception to product disposal. One of the significant benefits of Windchill LCC is that it enables you to factor reliability metrics into lifecycle cost, which is an often hidden, but significant, factor in overall product lifetime cost. By accounting for component failures and repairs along with related labor costs and maintenance activity costs, you can obtain a thorough analysis of true product cost.
Windchill LCC encompasses a variety of cost calculations.
Calculation
Description
Total system cost
The most basic of cost computations, total system cost reflects the cost of your system over its entire lifecycle by using the cost breakdown structure of your system.
Line item Costs
Windchill LCC computes the cost of each of the line items in your cost breakdown structure. Depending upon structure granularity, you can see the costs associated with the various parts of your product lifecycle, such as design costs, R&D expenses, maintenance costs, labor fees, and more.
NPV (net present value)
With the time intervals functionality of Windchill LCC, you can take into account inflation rates over the specified time interval you want to assess. Windchill LCC then projects the NPV of your system. The NPV is the cost of your system in today’s dollars based on inflation rates.
Costs based on design alternatives
With the alternatives feature of Windchill LCC, you can compare the costs of various design alternatives. For example, to fix a known issue, you could look at the cost of retrofitting a current design with a corrective action solution versus the cost of a system redesign.
Costs based on design alternatives and inflation rates
Using a combination of the time intervals and alternatives features, you can factor in inflation rates to analyze the cost of design alternatives.
Sensitivity analyses
Windchill LCC supports sensitivity analyses, which enable you to see which variables have the most impact on your system cost. By varying different cost items over a range of fluctuations, you can see which variables have the most significant influence on total cost. Ensuring highly sensitive variables remain stable enables you to more easily keep costs in check.