Cost-Effective Designs Boost Profits

By DE Editors

Akoya Inc. (Rosemont, IL) says that its Design Workbench product suite is intended to help product designers in heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace, and defense companies develop more cost competitive products and increase profits in new product introductions by up to 15 percent.

The Design Workbench advances lean product development practices by giving companies insight into more cost-effective designs through what the company calls the Competitive Band – a determination of the most efficient price range in which a manufacturer can acquire a product component in the market from an effective producer for any combination of design variables. This is said to result in quicker time-to-market through the elimination of cross-functional bottlenecks as well as lower product costs resulting from improved design cost visibility across product platforms.

The Competitive Banding process accumulates a manufacturers’ current purchase price, production and detailed component attributes, applies advanced information science and analytics to evaluate competitive drivers, and determines the actions required to achieve a more competitive cost for the product components.

”We have seen that 80 percent of the design cycle can be spent re-working a product to meet cost parameters because they were not known when the critical design decisions were made,” said Brett Holland, Akoya’s president, in a press statement “With Akoya’s Design Workbench, designs can be evaluated for cost-effectiveness at any time, from concept through production. Additionally, the Competitive Banding information we use promotes more effective dialog between product design, supply management and manufacturing.”

For further details, visit the Akoya website.

Read why DE's Editors selected the Design Workbench Product Suite as their Pick of the Week.