Our Cost & Value Engineering consultants work with businesses to provide another lens, beyond traditional procurement levers, through which to tackle cost challenges. Using a bottom-up approach, we support the process of aligning costs to strategy as well as optimising the costs of current products and helping to shape future products – ensuring the benefits are maximised across the entire product lifecycle.
We combine cost and value engineering consulting and our proprietary digital platform to help drive operational excellence by accurately modelling various scenarios, and using detailed cost analysis to underpin activity focused on re-basing a business. Our approach has worked across multiple sectors for both simple and complex parts or assemblies as well as for services.
We have experience with all facets of cost including CAPEX, total lifecycle costs, R&D and distributions costs. Additionally, we understand how market dynamics, legislation, changing consumer behaviour and technological advances can affect demands on product design and add pressure to their lifecycle earnings. We work collaboratively with our clients, their incumbent and new suppliers to review approaches in manufacturing and design, implementing cost improvements without compromising product quality or capability.
Cost and value engineering ensures that our clients are not overspending in critical areas of their business – and, importantly, are able to optimise their operational cost base. Our team will look at all areas of an operation, but three common benefits of cost and value engineering are:
Our cost and value engineering consultants are able to advise on what our clients’ target cost should be for a particular product, component or the business as a whole. This ensures that a product or component is not over-engineered, therefore reducing spend through the whole business including design, materials, complex manufacturing processes and shipping weight.
Our cost and value engineering consultants are able to help clients forge better relationships with their suppliers by getting all parties to deal in facts, ensuring transparency around what the target cost is and therefore helping reduce cost across the supply chain and getting the right quality of the right part from the right supplier.
Our team are able to work with our clients’ designers, procurement teams, engineers and finance departments so they are all working together and understand each other’s needs, which in turn helps reduce costs within our clients’ operations.
Very few consultancies offer a genuine end-to-end cost and value engineering solution. Ultimately, our cost and value engineering team stands out due to the depth and detail that they go in to – they don’t just provide an estimate, surface overview or theoretical approach; instead, they work in collaboration with our clients and their suppliers to provide practical, proven solutions to analyse the cost base, and identify and implement the right solutions.
This collaborative approach means that we are able to help build a relationship between our client and their supplier that goes beyond profit margins and instead is based on mutual growth.
Our cost and value engineering consultants work across – and have direct experience in – multiple sectors, including automotive, aerospace, transport, manufacturing and defence and as a result have an in-depth understanding of the specific requirements and nuances of a breadth of industries. In addition, we combine our digital platform with specialist 3rd party tools, enabling us to adjust to our clients’ needs, regardless of size or sector.
Whether you’re looking to make longer-term strategic cost decisions or drive operational efficiencies at pace, we work as part of your team to deliver tangible, quantifiable results.
Value Analysis Value Engineering (VAVE)
Value Analysis Value Engineering is a methodical way to assign a cost to the value or function of a product. This then allows a company to optimise the relationship between the two ensuring that products are not over-engineered or under-designed but instead are “just right” for their assigned task and therefore costed correctly.
By employing VAVE analysis our cost and value engineering consultants are able to help companies ensure they build products that are engineered for the task to keep costs down.
Should cost modelling
This is a sequence of calculations to work out how much a service or product should cost. By using data points collected through years of operating in this space our cost and value engineering consultants are able to combine this data with their experience to accurately reflect a client’s current cost model.
Clients can use the cost modelling produced to help future procurement cost negotiations, allowing our clients to conduct “fact-based negotiations”.
Make versus buy
A key decision most companies need to make is whether they should make certain components or buy them in from a supplier.
To understand what the right choice is, our cost and value engineers work with clients to understand the true cost of making something in-house, including taking into account “overhead allocation”. By helping clients better understand these costs, they can then make a better-informed decision.
Design to cost
This is the process of designing a product with cost in mind, at volume. By knowing exactly how much a product needs to be manufactured for, this gives our clients’ designers and engineers the understanding they need to design a product that is not only fit for purpose but one that can be produced at a profit.
Lifecycle costing
Lifecycle costing looks at all elements in the life of a product, from the start of life tooling, packaging, logistics, through to mid-life servicing and finishing with end-of-life disposal.
Our team use lifecycle costing techniques to help clients understand the total costs of their products. This in turn helps clients forecast and plan for the future.
Carbon footprint calculation
We work with clients to gain a clear picture of the carbon emissions of their products, taking an in-depth look at the carbon profile of products and their parts, to identify those with the highest emissions.
We also work alongside your teams to model different scenarios to understand the impact these will have on carbon output, before recommending, and if required executing, specific actions to help reduce the overall emissions.
Battery manufacturing assessment
We have developed the battery manufacturing assessment to help our clients get more transparency around the commercial impact and investment decisions they need to make to ramp up production in battery manufacturing.
Our battery manufacturing assessment also provides key insights for manufacturing scalability – shaping the art of the possible for tomorrow’s gigafactories.
Combined with our cost transformation, digital platform and operational capabilities, we help our clients make informed strategic decisions as they embark on and accelerate their electrification journey.
Whether you’re looking to make longer-term strategic cost decisions or drive operational efficiencies at pace, we work as part of your team to deliver tangible, quantifiable results.
Value Analysis Value Engineering is a methodical way to assign a cost to the value or function of a product. This then allows a company to optimise the relationship between the two ensuring that products are not over-engineered or under-designed but instead are “just right” for their assigned task and therefore costed correctly.
By employing VAVE analysis our cost and value engineering consultants are able to help companies ensure they build products that are engineered for the task to keep costs down.
This is a sequence of calculations to work out how much a service or product should cost. By using data points collected through years of operating in this space our cost and value engineering consultants are able to combine this data with their experience to accurately reflect a client’s current cost model.
Clients can use the cost modelling produced to help future procurement cost negotiations, allowing our clients to conduct “fact-based negotiations”.
A key decision most companies need to make is whether they should make certain components or buy them in from a supplier.
To understand what the right choice is, our cost and value engineers work with clients to understand the true cost of making something in-house, including taking into account “overhead allocation”. By helping clients better understand these costs, they can then make a better-informed decision.
This is the process of designing a product with cost in mind, at volume. By knowing exactly how much a product needs to be manufactured for, this gives our clients’ designers and engineers the understanding they need to design a product that is not only fit for purpose but one that can be produced at a profit.
This is the process of designing a product with cost in mind, at volume. By knowing exactly how much a product needs to be manufactured for, this gives our clients’ designers and engineers the understanding they need to design a product that is not only fit for purpose but one that can be produced at a profit.
We work with clients to gain a clear picture of the carbon emissions of their products, taking an in-depth look at the carbon profile of products and their parts, to identify those with the highest emissions.
We also work alongside your teams to model different scenarios to understand the impact these will have on carbon output, before recommending, and if required executing, specific actions to help reduce the overall emissions.
We have developed the battery manufacturing assessment to help our clients get more transparency around the commercial impact and investment decisions they need to make to ramp up production in battery manufacturing.
Our battery manufacturing assessment also provides key insights for manufacturing scalability – shaping the art of the possible for tomorrow’s gigafactories.
Combined with our cost transformation, digital platform and operational capabilities, we help our clients make informed strategic decisions as they embark on and accelerate their electrification journey.
We are ideally placed to help complex businesses accelerate the transformation of their cost bases.
Client collaboration is at the heart of our approach
We cut through complexity quickly
We're focused on delivering long-term outcomes for clients
We work with clients to set the strategy and deliver the nuts and bolts of the solution
Intelligent approach to cost optimisation through deep understanding of cost and cost drivers
Deliver quantifiable cost reductions through our cost neutral fee structure
We will explore how businesses can more effectively navigate an evolving market landscape by critically evaluating their existing packaging strategies
and exploring innovative alternatives.
We discuss how should food and drink businesses prepare to scale and when should they move from planning to implementation.
In our latest report we examine the impact of power electronics and the importance of inverters in EV manufacturing.
