Re: Engineering costs

[Elton Smith <elton@jlab.org>]

Hi Steve,

Your suggestion like a good way to start. We will be working on putting
this together. 

How do you account for the cost of (permanent) engineering lab staff that
are on salary and do not impact a construction budget directly? This falls
into the catagory of physicist's time and effort that also contribute to
the project.

Hopefully we can use your years of experience to take a good stab at this
problem.

Thanks, Elton.  



Elton Smith
Jefferson Lab
elton@jlab.org
(757) 269-7625

On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Steve St.Lorant wrote:

> Dear Elton,
> 
> As an avid reader of your and your colleagues' communications on the
> subject of Hall D, I noticed that you have been struggling with the
> perennial problem of estimating engineering costs for the project which
> involves the collaboration of a number of different laboratories. As one
> who has faced this problem many times in the last decade, permit me to make
> a couple of suggestions.
> 
> First, do not leave the costs out in the hope that you will be able to
> introduce them in the later stages of the proposal preparation. This is
> fatal, unless you are a tremendously disciplined, persuasive and single
> minded collector of information from your collaborators,(which I am
> definitely not).
> 
> Second, I include engineering costs ab initio as a percentage of the cost
> of a particular portion of the project. Specifically, when I prepare a WBS,
> I do a third level rollup of all net costs, materials, supplies and
> fabrication/technician/shop labor of a particular WBS component. I then
> take 15% of that amount, assign it a third level WBS number, call it ED&I
> (Engineering, Design and Inspection), and add it as "engineering and
> design" costs to that  component. Then I do a second level rollup.
> 
> I cannot tell where I found this method, but I can assure you that even
> with very few components in the WBS, the estimate is remarkably accurate.
> 
> Forgive me if I have been preaching to the choir!
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Steve St.Lorant
> 
> SLAC  10/31/00
> 
> PS.  By "net costs" I mean no overhead, no laboratory taxes and no
> contingency.