Last year, I gave you a formal introduction to Akoya in my post Ahoya, Akoya and their unique solution for reducing direct material spend, which was described by their co-founder and president Brett Holland in his posts on Getting Ahead of the Product Cost Management Curve and Taking Control of Cost Management for Engineered Direct Materials over on Spend Matters. (With additional information to be found in their short paper on why analytically derived should-cost information is critical for improving product margins.)

When I was back in the mostly windy city recently, I had a chance to catch up with Akoya and discuss their new product offering, currently in beta with a few select customers, which is designed to complement their existing product offering and help organizations save even more on their manufactured part purchases.

Their current product offering, Category Workbench, allows a company to identify which parts it is likely paying too much for using a technique Akoya calls "competitive banding". By extracting identifying features and product composition information from part designs, Akoya's Category Workbench can automatically group parts into categories by common design elements and raw material composition and extrapolate average prices. Using this information and market costs, it can also statistically extrapolate expected prices for each part in a category and identify those parts that are currently being sourced at below market price, at market price, and above market price. This allows the company to identify those parts that present savings opportunities through re-sourcing, re-negotiation, or re-design. With this information in hand, a company not only knows where its sourcing teams should direct their sourcing efforts, but where it's engineering teams should direct their redesign efforts. Considering that re-design and re-costing of even a simple part through a system like MTI Systems' Costimator or Apriori's Virtual Product Environment* can take a design engineer the better part of a day at the low-end, and a few days at the high end, and that their time is very expensive, this is very important as a company that sources thousands of direct parts can only attack a few hundred parts in a given year, and the wrong choice (based simply on a spend analysis by volume, supplier, or cost) can cost a company more money than the redesign effort will save.

Akoya's next product, Designer Workbench, is going to allow a company to dive into those parts where the Category Workbench indicates a potential savings opportunity in a way that's going to allow the company to determine the potential extent of the savings opportunity in minutes instead of hours, or even days. In addition to a number of new search, costing, and CAD data support features, which I plan to dive into at a later date after the product is generally available, one of the significant new features that this product is going to include is a new "What If" Analysis Tool. Using market pricing and price data from other products in the competitive band, this tool is going to allow an engineer to quickly create virtual variants with different features, treatments, processes, and raw materials and calculate estimated costs in real-time. In a matter of (less than 15) minutes (on average), a design engineer is able to iterate through a number of options and identify not only a lower cost alternative, but the high level design features that the lower cost alternative needs to have. In beta tests with an existing client, the estimated costs produced by the solution have been found to be accurate within 95% or more (when compared with detailed Costimator analyses which take an average of 6 hours for the customer in question). Needless to say, these are some amazing results, and I suspect that a forward thinking company that properly utilized this solution in conjunction with complementary solutions would see incredible returns. But that's also a subject for a later post.

* Although re-design and re-costing through Apriori's Virtual Product Environment can be done in a matter of minutes once the environment is configured and appropriate cost information entered, setting up one of these environments usually takes days, and often requires the assistance of Apriori personnel.