In early January 2010 the authors participated in a meeting with the chief engineer for a company in which a central part is manufacturing of printed circuit boards (PCB). At this meeting it emerged that the machinery and production methods have changed substantially since the early 1990's. The spreadsheet for preliminary production time calculations by the company is today based on conditions from almost 20 years ago. The company has over the years been trying to adjust the spreadsheet template. The result of these adjustments has filled it with historical residue, something which makes the template difficult and time consuming when the primary user tries to handle it.

The purpose of this study was to help the company increase its accuracy in the representation of the production times for the different PCB-based products by developing a new costing model based on an already existing but inadequate spreadsheet template. The company also expressed the wish that the new costing model would be less time consuming to work with.

The methods used to achieve the goal are interviewing, participatory observations and meetings with relevant persons. The data obtained were analyzed using the theory on PCB production and visualization of data. Many questions have also been clarified through additional interviews and some meetings. This has made it possible to analyze the total production time of most work stations. Studies of Mathematical Statistics show that the total time variance is made up of the different work stations variance. This insight has influenced us in our analysis of the various work stations.

After the analysis and discussion between us and the company's technical director together with production engineers concerning the time parameters for each workstation a pilot template and user guide were designed. The pilot template and user guide has been developed in accordance with the theory of visualization and has been evaluated by the company's production and marketing departments. This generated a final proposal on the spreadsheet template and user guide. This proposal is an Excel-based spreadsheet template consisting of six tabs: Presentation marknad, Presentation teknik, Variabler, Konstanter, Formler and a user's guide which highlights the use of the tabs. "Presentation marknad” shows what marketers need for their work and the "Variabler" for the engineers. Tabs and User Manual has been designed with visualization in mind, for example, have different font sizes and colored text been used. Tabs "Konstanter" and "Formler" is the basic data and information on how core data can be changed when the need arises. The reason for the last two tabs characteristics is that through our identification and analysis of workstations and own studies performed by the company, the company is allowed to increase the templates accuracy compared to reality.