There were basically three customer groupings that were the focus of the decision support technology transfer activities of the ATACK project: plant management, cost analysts, and shop engineers/planners/managers. The key needs and concerns identified by these users were:

	Usable estimate for cost-of-equipment-downtime. The cost primarily results from a loss of revenue and the cost of idle assets while the equipment is down. The cost is a part of the total ownership cost for the equipment and bears on the decision to hire repair capacity or to purchase new equipment. Prior to ATACK, this cost variable was not available at OC-ALC.
	Time and effort to do cost analysis work. This includes the shops and plant management who put together the package for the cost/benefit analysis done by the cost analyst. This factor is particularly important in the ALC and depot environments where the indirect workforce has been reduced considerably and the workload is increasing.
	Communication and credibility among the groups. Managers, engineers, and accounting cost analysts do not necessarily agree on the same cost elements at the same level of detail or with the same priority. They also generally disagree on the relative importance of certain cost elements.
	Cost variance dynamics over time. For example, the benefit of having a piece of equipment that varies according to the variation in the volume of workload. Risk and unknown constraints also drive cost variance.
	Leverage of other cost work with the MOTI technology. For example, activity based costing, Discrete Event and Monte Carlo simulation, as well as parametric cost models, can be profitably combined with the MOTI knowledge based cost modeling.

KBSI demonstrated in this project that derivatives of MOTI analytic models for estimating throughput, capacity, and queuing models could be applied as workflow planning tools in actual maintenance, repair, and overhaul domains. As a consequence, the benefit of the Pathfinder strategy to the DoD is the reduction in cost and cycle time for products produced by improved processes or by the improvement in quality of those products themselves.

Pathfinder Benefits

In addition to the transition of actual research technology into production application, a major focus of Pathfinder was to discover ways to make this transition efficient, rapid, and affordable. In this respect, the Pathfinder project acheived innovative methods and technology for making the US's vast asset base of research results more productive.

In addition, Pathfinder's rapid implementation cycle enabled simultaneous creation of commercializable products. The KBSI SMARTCOST® product that existed before the start of the effort was extended significantly. A new product, SMARTSTAT™, evolved from the need to apply robust Monte Carlo simulation techniques to the implementation of cost and benefits estimation models. Recognizing the value of the rapid simulation of process execution costs, we also developed a built in simulator for the KBSI PROSIM® tools.