So, you have decided you need to invest in a new software-based design tool for your business. You know it will have a positive impact and you’re ready to get the process started. It can be tough to convince the executive team that the investment required achieves good value, especially if they don’t fully understand the systems merits or your current design struggles, so you’ll need to make a good business case for the investment.
Here we help you build the case to present to your management team with the top five arguments for investing in a new software design tool.
Q1) What are the problems being solved?
A. Firstly you will need to be very clear about the problem with your current design methods so the executive team, who probably aren’t all involved in design, clearly understand the full impact of these problems.
If you are using manual design and a form-board method for designing and laying out your wire harnesses you could be incurring one or a number of problems in the process. These could include human error not picked up in the original design, poor quality at the prototyping stage, which has an impact on your costs and ultimately these problems impact the company’s reputation, profit margins and the time to market.
Q2) Why do you need to solve them?
A. Your executive team will know that the market you operate in returns very tight profit margins for the business. If you don’t improve the design and manufacturability of your products, those profit margins will begin to erode as material costs rise and time to market increases. Your new design tool will effectively help you increase the profit margins of each design.
Q3) What are the cost savings?
A. To people outside of your design team, the investment needed for the design tool might seem significant. When making the case for the investment you will need to be clear about the costs it will be saving to offset the outlay.
Some of the benefits that impact the business costs are: prototypes that are right first time so there won’t be a need to spend time on expensive reworking incurring additional materials costs and delaying delivery. Time to market is reduced so you will be able to increase throughput. Automatic generation of manufacturing documentation such as the BoM, from-to lists, test data and form-board drawings, quality control guidelines etc will save huge amounts of time over the manual alternative and reduce human error.
Q4) What revenue enhancements does the software bring?
A. Any investment in software tools should make your process more efficient enabling the design team to complete higher quality work in far less time. This will therefore increase throughput and in due course, free up the sales team to bring on more customers. Less easy to measure, but just as important is the effect these improvements will have on the company’s reputation in the marketplace.
Q5) Can you arrange a free demo that focuses on actual usage not the sales pitch of benefits?
A. A good, reliable software vendor will be able to provide you with a useful demonstration of actual use cases that cuts through the sales jargon. During this demonstration it is important that you can quickly and effectively understand the full capabilities of the tool and see how it will fit into your workflow.
To ensure the software will deliver the savings you need, make sure your vendor offers a free evaluation to try on one of your own projects. This should prove the benefits of the software to before you commit to buy and mitigate any risk in making a purchase you later regret.
Once the decision to purchase has been made you will also need to ensure your supplier provides training and ongoing support.
To get the investment agreement from the executive team you’ll probably want to present them with a formal business proposal that demonstrates that you have fully analysed the costs, features and benefits. A quick Google search will throw up no end of templates you can use for this purpose, and we are always here to support you through the process.
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Centricity Consulting is a UK-based company specialising in software tools and services for the design, analysis and manufacture of wire harnesses and flexible materials. Talk to us today about your engineering needs.
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