Trade Study Report skill

Trade Study Report

A trade study is the formal way an engineering team chooses between design options: criteria that matter, weights on how much, options scored against each one, a weighted total that ranks them, and a memo that defends the pick in review.

The analysis is the expert work; the memo is assembly. An engineer runs the simulations, then loses a day or more turning results into a document — assembling scores, writing up the reasoning, formatting a table, defending it the first time someone asks "what if cost mattered more?" This skill does the assembly.

It does not run analysis. It reads scores that already exist — from design-space-explore's variant manifest, from a simulation report, from engineering judgment stated plainly as judgment — and turns them into a ranked, defensible comparison.

Quick start

→ Load the matrix: criteria, weights, options, scores. Weights sum to 100?
→ Every option scored against every criterion? Report the gap, never impute
→ Compute weighted totals and rank
→ Run the sensitivity analysis. Always — never optional
→ Check constraint compliance separately. A violation disqualifies, never
  just lowers a score
→ Write the memo: recommendation, reasoning, what was ruled out, risks
→ Produce the scored comparison table, reviewable

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Inputs

First, find the plant setup: from the task's own folder (never cd into the plugin), run python3 -I <this skill's folder>/../../shared/scripts/plant_setup.py find, do its setup_page_first step, then read the profile at profile_path and any rate at rates_path, per ../../shared/replies.md.

Input	Source	Form
Trade study matrix — criteria, weights, options	M365 (Excel/Word), or defined in conversation	XLSX / DOCX / conversation
Analysis results per option	M365 (simulation reports, test data, spreadsheets)	Documents / CSV
Variant manifest	design-space-explore output	../../shared/contracts/variant-manifest.md
Requirements and constraints	M365 requirements document	Documents
The plant's trade study memo template	## Plant context, captured during onboarding	Template
Prior trade studies	M365	Documents — for format and precedent
Cost data per option	ERP cost: NetSuite standard cost, or Infor M3 last purchase price (../../shared/erp-connectors.md); or estimates	Connector / documents

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Workflow

Step 1 — Load the matrix

Criteria, weights, options, scores. Validate that weights sum to 100, and that every option is scored against every criterion.

Report gaps rather than imputing a score. An unscored cell is a finding, not a zero — filling it in with a guess is exactly the failure this step exists to prevent. Read reference/matrix-and-scoring.md.

When the options come from a design-space-explore manifest, three manifest-level signals surface here, before any scoring happens — per ../../shared/contracts/variant-manifest.md:

• A variant with status: regeneration_failed or status: skipped is listed as an unevaluated option, excluded from the ranking, and stated as excluded — never scored, never silently dropped from the list.
• A non-empty requested_not_driving means part of the requested design space was never explored. Say so.
• variant_count_confirmed: false means the variant set itself was never confirmed with the engineer before generation. Note that in the report.

Step 2 — Ingest analysis results

Map each result to its criterion and option, citing the source document for every score.

Where the source is design-space-explore's variant manifest, read scores from each variant's properties and analysis_results — never re-derive a number the manifest already computed, and never re-run an analysis this skill doesn't perform.

Step 3 — Compute weighted totals and rank

Score × weight, summed, per option.

Criterion direction must be explicit and verified before this step runs. Some criteria are lower-is-better — mass, cost — and some are higher-is-better. Getting one backward silently inverts the result, and nothing about the arithmetic will look wrong when it happens. Read reference/matrix-and-scoring.md.

Step 4 — Run the sensitivity analysis

Always. Never optional. Vary the weights across a plausible range and report where the winner flips, which criterion the decision actually rests on, and which options win under which weighting regimes.

This is the most valuable part of the skill and the part most often skipped. Weights are subjective — somebody decided cost was 30% and weight was 25% — and a recommendation with no sensitivity check hides exactly how much that decision mattered. Read reference/sensitivity-analysis.md.

Step 5 — Check constraint compliance, separately from scoring

An option that violates a hard requirement is disqualified, not low-scoring. These are different things, mixing them is a common error, and this skill keeps them apart throughout — a disqualified option never appears in the ranked comparison, only in its own list with the violated requirement named.

Step 6 — Write the decision memo

Recommendation, reasoning, the sensitivity finding, what was ruled out and why, and the residual risks in the recommended option. Read reference/decision-memo.md.

In the plant's own memo template where one was captured at onboarding. A trade study goes into the design record and gets defended in a review, so it has to arrive in the shape that record expects. Fall back to prior trade studies for format, then to a neutral structure — and name which was used, so nobody mistakes the house shape for their own.

Step 7 — Produce the scored comparison table

In a reviewable format, per Output below.

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Approval gates

This skill recommends; it does not decide. The memo is a draft an engineer reviews, signs, and defends in the design review — nothing here commits the plant to a design choice, the same way customer-inquiry-intake recommends a bid and root-cause-capa ranks candidate causes without concluding.

Nothing is written back to any system of record.

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Output

Every document this skill produces is printed in the reply, in full. Saving a copy to a file as well is fine, as Word or Excel per ../../shared/replies.md, never .txt; a file instead of the reply is not. The person reads the reply, and every delimited block and outbound check lives in it — a document only on disk has been neither seen nor checked. A record handed to another skill is saved and summarised, never pasted as raw YAML; memory blocks are written where the plant's memory lives; and the name on an approval is asked, never taken from the account. All three per ../../shared/replies.md.

The scored comparison table — options × criteria, weighted, ranked, with every score cited to its source. Each cell shows its contribution (normalized score × weight) beside the raw score, so a reader can see where a total came from without a calculator, and the table carries an explicit rank column rather than leaving the order to be inferred from the totals.

The sensitivity analysis — flip points, the most decision-sensitive criterion, and the regime-by-regime winners.

The decision memo — recommendation, reasoning, the sensitivity finding, ruled-out options with their cause, and the residual risks in the recommended option.

The constraint compliance summary — disqualified options listed separately from the ranked ones, each with the requirement it violated.

The memo is a controlled document: it follows the plant's own trade study template, per ../../shared/artifact-style.md, and is never restyled. Where no template is on file, use a plain neutral format and say the template is missing. Only a separate internal comparison view, which the team refers back to in review, uses the house artifact style.

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Edge cases and failure modes

• Weights don't sum to 100 — report it. Do not normalize silently.
• An option is unscored on a criterion — report the gap. Never impute a score.
• Two options are within noise of each other — say so explicitly rather than presenting a false winner.
• Scores are on inconsistent scales — 1–5 against 1–10 against raw units. Normalize, and show the normalization.
• Some criteria are lower-is-better, some higher-is-better — direction must be explicit per criterion. Getting it wrong silently inverts the result.
• No analysis results yet, only the matrix — produce the scored comparison and clearly mark it as judgment-based, not analysis-based.

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Degradation

Runs entirely from a filled-in matrix and pasted figures, with no connector and no CAD backend at all.

Not available	What happens
A variant manifest from design-space-explore	The matrix and its options come from a document or conversation instead. A hand-authored manifest with cad_backend: none is a valid, complete input, not a fallback — per ../../shared/contracts/variant-manifest.md
Analysis results, on every option	The comparison runs on judgment alone and says so, throughout — every score reads as judgment-based, never presented as analysis-based
Analysis results, on some options	Score what is analyzed, report the gap per unanalyzed option, and never impute a score to fill it in
ERP cost	Price from a supplied estimate or a document, with its source, rather than leaving cost unscored
The plant's memo template	Fall back to prior trade studies for format; failing that, a neutral memo structure — and say which, because onboarding's gaps list promises exactly this degradation
Prior trade studies	Use a neutral memo structure and say the plant's own format was not available

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Chain position

Not part of a named chain. Consumes from design-space-explore directly — the same producer-consumer relationship breakdown-diagnosis has with daily-production-report in Chain 4.

Metric. Design decisions per quarter; design cycle time.

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Reference files

File	Load when
reference/matrix-and-scoring.md	Steps 1 to 3 — validating the matrix, citing scores, normalization, criterion direction
reference/sensitivity-analysis.md	Step 4 — always, before ranking is presented as final
reference/decision-memo.md	Steps 5 to 7 — constraint compliance, the memo, the comparison table
../../shared/contracts/variant-manifest.md	Step 2 — reading scores from a generated or hand-authored manifest