Know your worth.

If you’re ramping up production or looking to purchase a large number of devices, should-cost forms an important part of the process. Having an estimate of how much the device cost to produce allows you to make an informed decision.

Should-cost involves working out how much an electronic product cost to manufacture. We can carry this out as an independent assessment so that you can validate any pricing you have been given by a manufacturer.

Our engineers will typically start by collating a full bill of materials for the parts in the systems. We’ll then use our industry connections to obtain our own prices for all those parts, typically approaching a range of manufacturers so that we can fully capture the current market prices.

Once we have a fully costed bill of materials, we’ll use our in-depth knowledge of manufacturing processes to calculate the cost of each manufacturing step, adapting the cost to account for local labour rates. We also take the time to consider any volume pricing discounts that might be available from a component manufacturer.

Understanding manufacturing costs is invaluable when buying high volumes of equipment. BLS can reverse-engineer devices and estimate the cost of manufacturing and shipping. Our proprietary tools allow us to build a bottom-up model of component, PCB assembly (manual and pick-and-place), injection moulding, metalwork, testing, software, packaging, and shipping costs. These are adjusted for anticipated volumes and country of manufacturing. Electrical component typically form the bulk of the cost. We use our modelling and experience as product designers to estimate volume discounts.

We can also highlight any areas where cost can be reduced, either through design changes or component substitutions. This type of should-cost exercise helps our clients decide whether ‘buy or build’ is the best approach, or to work with a preferred supplier to achieve the cost target.

If you’re ramping up your production volumes, ensuring you realise your target cost is a crucial step. We offer a cost-reduction service to help you achieve maximum profitability.

We start by completing a full electronics design review of the system, to ensure that we fully understand how it is operating and compare this to your specification. This will allow us to identify areas we can look to reduce cost.

Our consultants will then work with you to reach your target pricing by challenging the components selection and redesigning functional blocks. Using our wealth of experience in cost management, we’ll help you identify the best areas to reduce costs without any reduction in the quality of the electronic product.