§ Can part-assembled components be bought in to save on assembly time?
§ Can the incidence of the cost drivers be reduced?
§ Is there some degree of overlap between the product-related fixed costs that could be eliminated by combining service departments or resources?
A key aspect of this is to understand which features of the product are essential to customer perceived quality and which are not. This process is known as ‘value analysis’. Attention should be focused more on reducing the costs of features perceived by the customer not to add less value.
