The keywords Industry 4.0, interconnectivity, autonomous driving, climate change and electrification usually correlate directly with steadily increasing spending on development work. A large share of these development costs is incurred on commissioning external service providers. With our development calculations we provide support to procurement so they can assess the value of the requested services and put the results into action in negotiations.
The traditional manufacturers of industrial products have to adapt themselves and their research and development activities to new competitors and their innovative products at lightning speed. This means there is strong cost pressure on process and product.
The phases in the PDP depend
on the industry and customer
PRODUCT DEFINITION
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION
SERIES DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION
PREPARATION OF SERIES PRODUCTION
LAUNCH OF SERIES PRODUCTION
The first costs to be incurred in the early phase of the product development process are the development costs. After commissioning a supplier, the development costs usually increase rapidly as the project progresses as a result of changes. Using our Development Costing approach it is possible to determining the costs of developing components and software enabling the potential for cost reductions to be addressed more effectively in negotiations.
The methodology we have developed enables us to analyse in detail the very complex processes for hardware and software which run in a series of continuous iteration loops in an agile development and to depict these processes transparently. This is based on a comprehensive basis of knowledge and data and a calculation tool that makes the results of the development cost calculation transparent and clear.
The costing itself can be set up along the product development process (PDP) on an industry-specific basis as well as on a company-specific basis. The PDP is divided up into the smallest of sub-processes with clear tasks being defined for each sub-process. Working out particular cost-drivers for the sub-processes allows the development costs of the different project requirements to be calculated in detail.