The ability to leverage models within a broader application of systems engineering has been limited in many cases due to lack of capability for distributed simulations to concurrently model multiple attributes of a system. Military performance models typically emphasize one area such as mobility or survivability, and are rarely connected to models for reliability, maintainability, and availability or procurement and lifecycle sustainment cost. Federations of training simulations to support the requirements of the training community are numerous and well-studied, but leveraged far less during the early phases of systems analysis. The Framework for Assessing Cost and Technology (FACT) is an open architecture web services based environment that enables the interconnecting of models to provide a rapid exploration of the design tradespace in support of systems engineering analysis. FACT is government owned, model agnostic, and capable of linking disparate models and simulations of both government and commercial origin through the application of community established data interoperability standards. This paper describes the utility of using FACT to achieve near real-time analysis for exploring the design parameter trades that affect the overall performance, reliability, and cost of a system design. FACT provides decision support tools to the acquisition program IPT to manage risks of cost, schedule, and performance through a rapid analysis of alternative technology and materiel using surrogate models, or equation regression representations of more complex M&S tools, as illustrated through several successful implementations discussed in this paper. FACT will ultimately reduce program development and life cycle costs, both of which are tenets of effective "should-cost" management.