Top 10 Reasons you should be using costCompare!

Typically, organisations require third party suppliers to provide some or all their electrical harnesses. Smaller organisations rely totally on the suppliers quote for the job to provide their cost baseline, others may shop around for prices and the most sophisticated, run internal programmes to calculate the expected costs of their designs.

costCompare was designed to suit the needs of all these types of organisation to automate, analyse and manage to an extremely high level of detail the costs involved in manufacturing a design.

To be competitive in the market and ensure that you are paying the appropriate amount for your outsourced harness manufacturing you need to have a costing programme in place that provides full coverage of everything you need to have manufactured.

costCompare is the solution and here is why:

1. Accurately estimate purchase cost without any manual effort

It is no joke, we are all busy, timescales are short, and resources are stretched. If you produce or alter numerous designs per week it is unlikely that you can manually cost each one. Sampling and Auditing suppliers has its place, but generally a retrospective activity after the event. Automated costing delivers results in seconds and gives you 100% coverage. No design needs to go un-costed.


2. Estimate cost immediately when engineering drawing is complete.

As alluded to above, costing is generally not only a retrospective event, but is usually triggers after going through several people/teams in an organisation. Using costCompare drawings can be costed instantly the engineer is finished on them, and the results sent to all stakeholders. That way the intellectual capital in your organisation can be spent in the best way – providing insight and solutions rather than crunching numbers in a spreadsheet.


3. Run detailed cost reports before release to highlight non-cost-effective processes and design features.

The increase in popularity of rapid design is starting to make its way into more and more industries. The ability for engineering to make better decisions earlier is critical to this model as it allows for transparency and agility before a design is committed to manufacture. Our technology allows this transparency to occur and provides the insight for optimal decision making. 


4. Prevent cost creep between revision changes by easily re-costing the complete design

In a lot of industries, it is not the initial quote for your manufacture where the supplier makes their money, it is on the revisions. After the spotlight is moved elsewhere on the introduction of a new design it is easy to allow costs to creep in when alterations are made. costCompare ensures that you always have a clear understanding of the costs and impact of changes, allowing you to negotiate with your suppliers should you receive unexpected costs on your quote.


5. Automatically cost for ALL harness variants

Most organisations do not have the luxury of manufacturing only a single variant of a product, in fact, most we see must produce harnesses for several variations and configurations of their products. These can soon stack up to an unmanageable number of items to cost and analyse. costCompare can cost and analyse every single variant of your designs, be it a handful to tens of thousands of harnesses, costCompare will ensure that you have statistical data to make sure there are no hidden surprises.


6. Use manufacturing profiles to quickly identify the cheapest region and manufacturer for a specific harness build.

We source and manufacture harnesses globally, we understand that the capabilities and associated costs of manufacturers vary significantly. costCompare allows you to create profiles for each of your suppliers, in their geographies and automatically apply appropriate costing based on numerous factors to ensure it is as accurate as possible. This way you can make an informed decision on with whom and where best to have your designs manufactured.


7. Manage different component/raw material costs per region

There is no longer any need to struggle correlating your supplier’s localised component costs when comparing like for like quotes from different global regions. costCompare can handle multiple simultaneous component databases with specific prices and profile for each region including handling of multiple currencies, tariffs, import tax and shipping charges.


8. Produce fully detailed costs from designs created in most popular ECAD toolsets.

costCompare is not only compatible with the Arcadia ECAD suite, but it can also generate detailed cost reports from a number of other BOM complete ECAD outputs such as Capital, Zuken E3, VeSys and Saber. This not only allows you to cost third party data from multiple systems to give like-for-like reports, but it also allows validation between your you and your manufacturer’s tools and processes seamlessly.


9. Export reports created as fully featured Excel workbooks with all values and formulas embedded.

You will have your own existing processes and ways of obtaining costing analysis. We at Cadonix like to ensure that our tools fit seamlessly into your process, and you may wish to use your costCompare data in other ways. That is why we offer full transparency in many of our reports by allowing them to be imported into Excel containing all the formulas and values we used to derive the figures. This makes it simple not only to understand and share the rationale behind a report, but to use the data in your own reports and systems.


10. Choose between summary, standard and detailed report levels depending on your target audience.

No matter who you plan to share your cost estimates with there is a report to suit them. From a summary breakdown of components & labour by type for review by your purchase department to a fully itemised breakdown for detailed open book for your Value Added Value Engineering division.

As you can see, if you are not implementing a 100% coverage programme today it is then likely you are paying more for your outsourced manufacturing than needed, both because of less-optimal BOM selection at the design stage, or poor data to aid you through negotiation. If you are interested in learning more about our costing tool and Arcadia suite please contact us at info@cadonix.com today.

Learn more at https://www.cadonix.com/solutions/cost/costcompare/ on how we leverage the power of the cloud to bring you the worlds best electrical harness costing suite.

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