I'm staring at my computer mouse far too hard.
It’s not moving on its own or anything like that, and I haven't given it a name. I just find it fascinating.
It cost me $10 from Dell. It has two buttons and a wheel, a bright red light underneath and a long tail.
It’s travelled over 100,000 miles with me and seen some sights.
It’s quite ordinary really. Very functional, a bit scratched, and because of the number of times it goes in and out of my laptop bag, will probably only be with me for another 6 months before I have to bury it in the garden with all the ones that came before it.
But what did my mouse cost to design? Probably tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds.
But mine has way less than 1% of its $10 ticket attributable to the fine art of design.
I then started to think about the brilliant engineers around the world that design custom products. What percentage of their products’ cost is the design element?
Bear in mind here, that for every product they design, they probably only sell 10% of them (They often have to design some or all of their offering during the quotation process)
So they have to design 10 products to sell 1.
They also have a pile of documentation to create too. Quotations, Bills of Materials, Cutting Lists, DXF etc. Every one of them is different for every customer.
How much of their products’ cost can be attributed to design?
I asked a few people.
It can be as high as 50%
That’s huge, and I didn't believe it.
I then spoke with one of our customers who, through using DriveWorks to automate the design of one of their products are now selling it at less than half the price that they used to.
They have taken their market by storm.
Now that IS huge.
For companies like them, cost savings in manufacturing, though important, pale into insignificance when compared with the saving gained by eliminating design costs through automation.
So bring on a world where the design cost of a custom product is way less than 1% of the overall costs.
So bring on Lean Design.
