Product
Perfect Cost Grid®
Digital cost-engineering and benchmarking
The first web-based benchmarking and digital cost-engineering platform – PA's Perfect Cost Grid® gives your purchasing, cost engineering, and development teams timely online access to the comparative data and costing tools they need to develop competitively priced products, achieve significant savings in material and software costs, and minimise investment.
We applied our extensive experience in the automotive sector and manufacturing to bring you the competitive advantage of benchmarking and cost-engineering capabilities—without needing to make the significant investment required to develop your own solution.
Perfect Cost Grid® enables your organisation to:
Access up to 1,000 ideas for saving production time, product cost and reducing vehicle weight
Explore 1,000 ready-to-deploy suggestions for reducing cost, weight or manufacturing complexity, either across the value stream of an entire vehicle or for its individual components. The database can be searched by segment, entire car, system or component and is being constantly expanded with new ideas for further vehicle models.
Benchmark your technical and commercial solutions against competitors
Compare technical and commercial solutions with competing vehicles instantly and gives insight into product description, bill of material and visual documentation such as photos or drawings for systems, components and parts. We update this database continuously: every year, we purchase new models, strip them down to pieces and calculate the cost of all major parts and systems, starting with three new models that have recently come to market.
Calculate product costs using proven templates and databases for machine, material and country-specific costs
Specify materials, machines, processes, overheads, logistics, and non-recurring costs. The cost-calculation tool draws on thousands of data items for machinery, consumables and material costs in more than 60 countries, and includes hundreds of ready-to-use templates eliminating the need to create these from scratch again and again.
Identify additional product cost savings through fine-tuning your calculations with PA’s online cost-engineering support.
Place fast-track orders online for specific calculations with priority support from PA’s cost-engineering experts. You will also benefit from comprehensive training by our experts, both online and on site, in how to use the platform and its tools.
Experience
PA Perfect Cost Grid is based on almost ten years of project experience across key sectors:
Automotive
- Joint project between a German and a French car maker to reduce costs though costs per vehicle were far exceeding target costs – identified savings potential of up to 690€ per car.
- Cost and weight optimisation for an EV platform of a global car maker in Germany when 36 months before start of production the cost were exceeding targets by up to 40% – identified savings potential of more than 2,000€ per car.
Telco
- Implementing cost engineering and achieving major savings for a global telco provider – ‘fit for design to cost’ resulted in new processes, governance and training of the team as well as realised cost savings of more than 500k€.
- Cost optimisation for three adiabatic cooling systems of a global telco provider – potential of 30% in average for each vendor based on clear idea descriptions and defined target costs.
Transport
- Improving procurement process, knowledge of processes and resources allocation for a leading train operator – achieved 20% savings in resources employed.
- Within 12 months we helped a signalling and control manufacturer to reduce contract costs by over 30% in a heavily regulated environment.
Industrial
- Conducting a teardown and benchmark project for five focus systems of a fork lift truck – 66 technical ideas identified with an estimated value of €286 to €453 for a fork lift truck led to supplier negotiations to reduce cost of components.
- Product cost optimisation of on- and offshore wind turbines – savings identified were double digit in percentage, based on technical input and success of the project the client established their own value engineering department.
Consumer and Medical
- Significant cost reduction for a drinks manufacturer aiming to deliver each unit to market with a 40% reduction in cost within a two year period – identified >60% potential savings for their next generation vending machine.
- Cost reduction for a medical device company – achieved savings in excess of 50% from the original design within a 14 months project timeframe and enhanced product stability.
