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Get engineering involved in a round of questions concerning your products.  Many companies give assignments to their engineers and do not open up the opportunities for redesign, material substitution or complete rethinking of the list of product uses.  Have your engineers take a second look at the required materials to consider cheaper substitutes on non-critical items.  Ask these open-ended questions because things change in a product’s life.  Material prices change also.

Questions to ask your engineers about changing products, reducing manufacturing time, using cheaper, different material or eliminating design flaws:

1. What would you change about this product to cut down manufacturing time?
2. Given you are assigned to cut cost and assuming you could change the material on this product, what material would you use instead, and what are your reasons?
3. Being an engineer, what design flaws do you detect in the manufacture of this product?  (Note: Your firm may make products for outside customers and you could offer cost-cutting ideas from your internal engineering group, if that were relevant or if that held a perceived value to your customer group.)
4. How could we make this product better, combine its manufacture with another piece, combine two pieces into one, manufacture more than one at a time, change material specs to cut cost or add fewer features and patent them, and increase the value of this product?
5. What material in the specification needs to be re-evaluated and possibly substituted in part or whole?
6. How do we take costs out of this product (i.e. material, packaging, process steps, unnecessary finishing, etc.)?
7. What part of the product is overbuilt or overdesigned for the function it provides?  Look at overpriced material specifications, overpriced finishes where less is adequate or possibly misses additional uses for this product not yet considered.
8. What on this product is wasted and not necessary?
9. What processes take the longest time or require the greatest amount of labor and differing steps?
10. What can be dropped, cut off, trimmed, reduced, cut back or changed to eliminate process steps?
11. Does the product do what it is supposed to do or is it overdesigned, poorly designed, designed incorrectly or awkwardly?

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