Abstract: A product development process which is capable of generating an estimate of the cost of developing and manufacturing the product as well as developing a plan to manufacture the product including parallel stages of product design, dimensional integration and manufacturing processes. At least two distinct levels of information are provided in the estimate generation, each level increasing in detail from a broad category first level to more detailed sub-levels. The plan includes the steps of defining customer deliverables, defining aids to create the customer deliverables and defining analysis steps to support the deliverables. Each of these steps are divided into sequential time cells.