Hi everyone,

I thought I would start an informational and totally unofficial discussion of the new cost rules. All official answers, add item requests and other correspondence must be submitted through formal channels as outlined in the rules, at SAE.org and on www.fsaeonline.com. However, because we're all working through the new rules together I thought it would be nice to have a more informal discussion as well as update you about the internal progress we have been making on the rules, Cost Tables and Cost Database.

Here we go:

1. Hopefully everyone has been to the SAE website and fund the Cost Tables and Appendices linked to our new dedicated Cost Website, www.fsaeonline.com. If you haven't go see what we have posted so far.

2. We haven't been able to announce the plan for receiving the data or tell you much about the tool we will be providing to the teams to build their costed Bill of Material (cBOM) so far. However, we can now. The system has three parts: A) A MS Access front end for the teams, B) An internet browser based interface for the judges and C) A SQL server back-end running on a hosting service. This allows teams to work offline and synchronize their data whenever they choose. Multiple team members will be able to work at the same time as long as they are careful to divide up the work and not overwrite each others data. It also gives the judges a flexible viewer that doesn't involve downloading software. And finally a program running on the server (probably Matlab) will be going through the data and check for common errors and omissions.

3. The Access front-end Beta release should be out in the middle of December and the full release in early January. That gives even the teams entered into the Virginia event six weeks or more to enter their data. I have previously asked for Beta testers, but have received many requests and have picked the Universities that will be participating. Sorry if your team could not be included, but it should only be a short wait from Beta to the full roll out. We will also have some Excel worksheets up on fsaeonline.com shortly for internal team use.

4. We are also planning to migrate all the electronic submissions to the new website, and will hopefully have that early in the new year as well. Until we post it to SAE.org or fsaeonline.com please continue to submit all materials the normal way through email as specified in the rules and online for your specific event.

Hopefully this helps to fill you in on all the work happening behind the scenes. The new Cost Rules and Tools represents a huge investment in both volunteer hours and monetary spending by SAE -- so we hope that the teams like the direction we're going. There may be some growing pains along the way but eliminating receipts and achieving a Cost Event with minimal subjectivity and a focus on engineering content is the goal for us all.

Questions? Comments? Fire away -- and remember everything published here is unofficial.

Bill Riley

Bill-

I comment on this as an alumni. I'm very glad to see the cost rules are being revamped, as previously I feel they were severely lacking.

I haven't seen much of the new rollout. From previous experience however, the main issue I had with the system was the lack of a "reality check," and not so much how the data was submitted and stored (though standardization is great).

What prevents someone from submitting say.. a very involved billet upright design and claiming it only takes 10 minutes of CNC time? Or just flat out lying about what parts are and aren't on the car?

It was very frustrating knowing that in reality, it cost us about $21,000 to build a fairly simple car. By the cost rules, that price came out to be pretty close (cheaper in some areas, more expensive in others). But seemingly the way to perform the best in that event would be to flat out BS everything. There were certainly vehicles that were MUCH more involved in both CNC and composite manufacturing, and were costed at $13,000. Ridiculous!

I appreciate your concerns with the prior rules. Many people worked very hard on them, but once we were able to identify some areas for improvement and ways to make that happen -- we took action to improve them.

The new rules do away with time altogether. The cost for machined components is now based on measurable parameters, such as the volume of the part being machined and the size of the original stock material. Since we have minimum machining thicknesses there is now a level playing field. We have used this methodology throughout the rules so that now every vehicle cost can be verified at the competition. Labor times have been replaced with a table costs based on the number and type of interfaces with surrounding parts. Composite lamination is based on surface area and number of plies. We have worked hard to remove all subjectivity from the cost report. There maybe some growing pains and things that can be improved but that is why we are trying to involve the teams at every step.

If you want a high level overview of the new rules see the tutorial that has been posted to the main page of fsaeonline.com. It's a pdf file and should be a good overview for alumni.

Bill

I was wondering is there going to be a new electronic BOM released this year or do teams create their own.

Teams will be provided a database tool to build their BOM. The database will have the systems preloaded and then the teams will add assemblies and parts, along with all the cost information for those parts. So currently the Excel spreadsheet will not be updated because that type of data will be output from the database.

Bill