Value Engineering
Original Equipment Manufacturers need solutions to drive cost out of their end products to remain competitive in the marketplace. Contrary to common believe, 80% of the cost of the components in their assemblies comes from associated costs not direct material costs. Associated costs include procurement, technical engineering support, auditing, receiving, quality inspection, warehousing, handling, kitting, part preparation, transportation costs and assembly costs. Through better designs and proven value engineering practices, Gexpro Services helps our customer reduce the associated costs resulting in more savings than solely focusing on direct material costs. Our engineers help drive cost of out our customers’ bill of materials through simplification, part standardization, and product teardown analysis.
What We Do
Part Standardization in the bill of material (BOM) allows our customers to reduce material overhead costs and improve manufacturing flexibility by promoting the use of common, cost-effective, reliable and available components in products/designs. Combining similar parts and condensing SKU’s on the BOM allows our customers to aggregate spend across common commodities. We commonly see opportunity in fasteners and hardware components for standardization opportunities. By rationalizing attributes such as lengths, head types, threads, and materials, Gexpro Services can standardize a BOM and offer suggestions to reduce the types of parts in an assembly.
Our product experts help our customers identify cost savings ideas by thoroughly reviewing part specification and understanding the application. Cost savings ideas are developed through material substitution, replacing specials with standard items, recommending alternate items, and part consolidation within an assembly.
Our process and product experts help our customers identify solutions related to process challenges and product application. Engineering process improvement ideas are developed through applying lean manufacturing concepts, eliminating processes, improving reliability, applying the right tool for the job, and simplifying manufacturing processes.
Gexpro Services can provide turnkey assemblies directly to our customer manufacturing and field environments. Partnering with our supplier partners, we can provide Certified ATEX / IECEx and UL assemblies. We review drawing and certification of components to validate compliance, and Gexpro Services offers design assistance to support both build to print and serial production.
Gexpro Services works with our customer to develop al list of actionable value engineering ideas to drive direct material productivity cost reduction. We capture these ideas by performing technical reviews on the products, and we work with our customers to assign priority based on savings impact and effort to execute the project. By collaborating with our customers’ design engineers, manufacturing engineers and sourcing leaders, we develop a strong project management cadence to execute the projects and drive savings for our customers.