Production economy and profitability depend on the quality of engineering design and manufacturing process planning. Product design and development take in a large sum of total expenditures including professional manpower, computer-aided modelling, simulation of experiments; and prototyping. It also involves customer demand analysis and market research in advance, which extend the pre-investment studies and add to total costs. In reverse engineering, the design phase is limited to identification the existing product using a backward recognition mechanism that can considerably affect the final cost of the products. In this paper, the elements of cost are compared between forward and reverse engineering and the differences are discussed. In addition, the deviations between actual and predicted costs are investigated for a few cases. Finally, the internal and external factors for these estimation errors are classified and the corrections are suggested.

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