Effectively Setting Product and Component Cost Targets and Designing to Them

Organizations are increasingly interested in making design-to-cost an integral part of their product development process. More than half of the organizations participating in APQC research on the topic use a design-to-cost approach in developing new products.

This research reveals several key points about design-to-cost:

• how organizations integrate design-to-cost into their product development process,
• how product and component cost targets are defined,
• the functional areas involved in the management of product and component costs, and
• how product targets are tracked and managed during the product life cycle.