Abstract
Changes in both the political environment leading to reductions in defence budgets, and the commercial environment, with competition creating cost pressures, are forcing companies to concentrate upon reducing cost throughout a product's lifecycle. This focus is especially important during design and development, because of greater pressures on costs and margins and the introduction of new management ideas and technical processes. As well as increasing requirements on the estimators, there are also increasing requirements on the information used by the estimators. This is because the cost models will demand new approaches to information management, beyond the provision of historical cost information, which remains the basis of cost information used today.