Presidents Message
Dear Colleagues,
I am looking forward to working with you as your new ACostE President. I have accepted the responsibility from Terry Bishop from 2nd September 2008, who has established ACostE as a more professional and successful organisation. Thanks to Terry for developing a solid foundation for the future.
Cost Engineering has become a necessity across all industrial sectors. Prediction, planning and control of true cost of projects have become key functions in many organisations. Our role is to promote people involved in cost engineering, good practice sharing across industry and formalisation of the process with scientific principles and techniques. ACostE could take a key role in understanding why spending on major projects often significantly exceed the initial cost estimate. Introduction of good practice and standards in project control is necessary for the success.
ACostE is playing a key role in setting standards and recognition of cost engineers and project control professionals. ACostE is organising a number of 'Best Practice' sharing events, running one of the most successful assessment service centres for project control professionals (TASC), promoting standards for vocational qualifications through ProVoc and recognising relevant academic qualifications and industrial experience through Certified Cost Engineers (CCE). ACostE has significant opportunity to support cost engineering standards development in other Countries through our members in those areas.
We have to do more; more for our members and more for the profession. ACostE is an international organisation with members from many countries around the World. Member Service will be a key focus for ACostE in the coming years. We would like to work with you to understand your expectations better and develop activities to match the need. We are going to start a period of consultation in the near future.
I would like to hear directly from you. If you have ideas to improve ACostE and the Cost Engineering profession, please write to me direct at: r.roy@acoste.org.uk .
Regards,
Professor Rajkumar Roy
President
ACostE
Dated: 6th October 2008
Professor Rajkumar Roy - Biography
PhD, MSc, M.E., B.E., CEng., MIEEE, MIED, FRSA, FACostE, MIE(I)
Professor of Competitive Design
Head of Decision Engineering Centre, Cranfield University, UK
Biography
Professor Rajkumar Roy is leading the Competitive Design research at Cranfield University for eleven years. Competitive Design within the Decision Engineering Centre is a fact based approach to study whole life of technology intensive products and services and optimise their design, along with efficient design information and knowledge management. Competitive design research starts with a better understanding of the true cost of a product, both from the design and manufacturing point of view as well as the 'whole life' perspective. The research focuses on improving the cost prediction even at the early stage of the design process. The cost engineering study also improves cost awareness among engineers to improve the value of a product or service. The knowledge about the true cost of a product, service or project helps to position the offering better against the market competition and can make the product more affordable.
Rajkumar Roy has advocated creative thinking in higher education and has started a number of new initiatives over last ten years. The latest initiative is to set up a new Centre for Competitive Creative Design (C4D). The Centre aims to embed design thinking across enterprises to improve their creativity and make them more competitive. This is an initiative to link design with science, technology and management. Rajkumar Roy is an enterprising academic leader interested in excellence and creating opportunity for people. He has over 12 years experience in building high performance teams and lead collaborative research and development with industry.
Rajkumar Roy completed his PhD (1997) and MSc (1993) with Distinction from University of Plymouth. He obtained 1st Class (Honours) BE degree in Production Engineering (1987) from Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India. Before coming to UK for further study, Professor Roy worked in TELCO (now TATA Motors) for three years and was selected as the Best Graduate Engineer Trainee in 1990.
Rajkumar Roy is an internationally leading academic in cost engineering with strong links with industry. He is especially interested in whole life cost prediction for capability contracts (product-service systems), formalisation of cost engineering and knowledge capture and reuse for cost engineering. He collaborates strongly with a number of defence, aerospace, automotive and process industries in Europe. His cross sector experience in cost engineering has led to best practice sharing and development of formal education in cost engineering. He is currently working on integrating creative design thinking with cost engineering principles to achieve a step-change in cost reduction for products and services. Rajkumar Roy is involved in the ACostE for over 8 years. He is one of the past Chairmen of the Engineering and Manufacturing Committee of the ACostE. He was one of the Vice Presidents of ACostE since 2006.
