The development of new and innovative products becomes a more and more complex task. At the same time, requirements for engineering processes regarding effort and cost reduction as well as improvements of product quality increase as enablers to place products successfully in the market. New engineering methods often promise large benefits for improving such processes. However, it is not trivial to determine the effect which a new method has on a process, and in addition if the new method pays-off for a company’s specific context. Evaluations of new methods without considering the context are often not satisfying. Also expensive pilot studies rather lead to a specific picture about the influence of a new method than to a more generic statement of its impact. In this work a methodology will be developed to analyse and estimate the possible impact of process changes quantitatively. Thus, strategic decision making for selection of new methods to achieve process optimizations will be supported. Cause-effect relationships will be used to describe process behaviour. Alternative processes will be simulated to estimate the possible benefit of a process change.