Optimising the Supply Chain - Design & Development for Cost
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Jan 08, 2019
We have found that not only do our customers benefit from working with Anders for the design and development of their embedded and LCD display technology, but through our company evolution, they now collaborate with us for a full end-to-end supply chain solution.
This means that we advise our customers on how to develop their product to reduce its lifecycle costs, and to do this, we examine their entire supply chain from a time and cost perspective and vice-versa.
Time = Cost
Designing for cost is an engineering driven process.
We live in a fast-paced world, and speed to market matters. Our customers demand speed to give them more time in the market, thus a longer yield period, especially in hyper-competitive environments.
Our central London base benefits our customer greatly from a speed and time perspective. Home to our design engineering and testing teams, these experts help our customers to inject speed into their supply chain by reducing their developmental costs. Their main aim is to design for manufacture (DFM), to ensure that the process is optimised. This optimisation injects speed.
Another trend that we have proactively responded to is reshoring. Many of our customers have explained that they no longer want to live with the pain of not being able to meet the market conditions and the struggle to communicate with their overseas suppliers due to time-zone variances, language and culture differences. This is why we have simplified the process for them, by acting as their manufacturing arm, communicating for them, scaling up their sketch, developing their design, and delivering the product to its end destination. Through 35+ years of experience of delivering display solutions, we have demonstrated our ability to enable our customers to enter into the market easier and quicker.
Cost = Time
Design to cost is a management-driven process, focussed on how to reduce cost without impacting time and quality.
At Anders, we address this need by working with all the relevant Original Component Manufacturers (OCMs). As we are the market leader in embedded and LCD display technology, we buy an incredible volume of component parts. Anders customers pull from our relationships to reduce their component sourcing risk, whilst benefiting from our economies of scale.
We also have mature and well-formed relationships with all of our overseas manufacturing partners, enabling us to control not only sourcing costs, but the entire supply chain. This secures a robust service which takes into consideration forecasting fluctuations, combined with supply and demand pressures. We erode the go-to-market risks, whilst fulfilling the need to go to market faster, with a simplified supply chain, enabling our customers to maintain a cost and time competitive advantage.
Cost Considerations
When we design a tailored supply chain solution for our customer, we take into account the total landed cost of ownership throughout the product lifecycle.
Our top five design and development cost considerations are:
- Designing for cost seeks to design the product once, and only once, to allow it to pass through the manufacturing process without any obstacles, problems, or failures
- Designing for cost seeks to minimise the lifecycle cost to the customer by designing high quality into the product
- Design to cost must reach product quality standards by building test and inspection into the manufacturing process time
- Designing for cost requires designing both the product, and the product delivery process for simplicity
- Designing for cost means that the product design should not be manipulated to be cost managed, the design should be engineered and the costs should be managed
