Design for Cost Effectiveness and Affordability

In Design for Cost Effectiveness and Affordability, you'll learn ...

• How affordability is defined in terms of best value in regards to various applications such as a wastewater plant, hydro power plant, and an oil pumping system
• Value engineering methods and concepts to achieve best value such as utility curves, return on investment, and life cycle cost analysis
• Identification of point of diminishing return and calculation of marginal gains in order to determine what is the best value for a design decision
• Apply utility scoring system for multiple design attributes such as reliability and fuel economy to select the best value
• The steps for implementing a value engineering program

Overview

Preview a portion of this course before purchasing it.

Credit: 3 PDH

Length: 49 pages

This course is intended to provide training on the common fundamentals of affordability to professional engineers.

The content is applicable to a wide range of engineering disciplines.

There are references such as to building design, wastewater plant, hydro power facility, and piping engineering.

This course is meant to provide an overview of the concepts for addressing cost and economic factors with a design.

It addresses affordability which is defined by the United States Defense Acquisition University as how much benefit and capability is achieved relative to the cost of a good or service.

The average consumer may define affordability as the ability to pay for a product.

Even with definitions of affordability varying between an average consumer and an organization like a federal agency, all suggest that affordability is concerned with the comparison of some monetary measure to known levels of customer income, investment or budget.

That is why it is paramount to describe or measure affordability in terms of cost effectiveness and economic value.

Specific Knowledge or Skill Obtained

This course teaches the following specific knowledge and skills:

• estimating investment or startup cost for hydro power plant and conduct sensitivity analysis to quantify how factors like turbine head and power rating affect the cost
• create a tornado plot as part of sensitivity analysis of a hydro power plants costs
• perform design decisions based on life cycle costs for a piping flow control (i.e., variable frequency drive versus control valve) and for building insulation
• review actual value engineering case studies involving a wastewater plant and a cargo crane for a maritime application
• case study of an oil pumping system’s reliability as a function of design and manufacturing cost using a mathematical model
• affordability mistakes with common examples of over design or over specification for building design and construction
• case study for a major electronics manufacturer’s warranty costs versus reliability
• plumbing engineering examples of best value versus cheapest price
• estimate the return on investment with upgrading the energy efficiency of an electric hot water tank using United States Department of Energy guidelines

Certificate of Completion

You will be able to immediately print a certificate of completion after passing a multiple-choice quiz consisting of 15 questions. PDH credits are not awarded until the course is completed and quiz is passed.