Addressing ‘Cost’ Right at the Design Stage- How Design Engineers Need to Take Charge

The typical “seat of the pants” way of determining costs just does not work in the complexity of the design processes in organizations today. Another drawback of this approach is the estimation of cost after the design phase has been completed. This is too late in the cycle. Given that a vast percentage of the costs are locked in at the design stage, the opportunity to control and optimize product cost is lost forever. Additionally, there is hardly any visibility of the functional aspects of a component in the supplier selection process which focuses only on the rates charged by the suppliers. This also makes the design process highly iterative and leads to product cost overruns and delayed product launch.

This webinar will look at the various aspects of cost and provide an overview of the typical current approach and how it is handled in organizations at various levels. The webinar will also demonstrate how early visibility of downstream issues in manufacturing and resulting additional costs will help design engineers. As the design moves from concept to detailed design, many decisions starting from material selection to final tolerances and the underlying tradeoffs need to be evaluated. Basic techniques will be demonstrated on how these decisions can be made earlier by readily spotting opportunities for cost optimization. It will be shown that early collaboration with manufacturing engineers, cost engineers and suppliers using data generated during design make discussions more productive and lead to data driven decisions.

Key take ways from webinar:

• Understand current methods of handling cost in organizations
• Learn how design engineers can drive cost optimization
• Learn techniques to get an early visibility of manufacturing cost