Would you pay $3400 for this cable?

Would you pay $3400 for this cable? That’s how much a new client would have lost out on if they had pushed ahead with manufacturing the second batch of their product without a design review.

We didn’t redesign the enclosure, the circuit board, or the packaging - in fact we deliberately wanted zero investment, pure profit savings. No re-tooling, no re-certification, no risk.

By diving into the BOM we identified an internal cable that was massively overspecified. Swapping this one cable saved $3.40 a unit - in fact, even if we had just changed distributor we would have save over a dollar.

The client is running 1,000 units, so that one cable swap contributes to a massive $3400 profit boost.

The only painful part? They had already manufactured 500 units before finding us. Across the whole BOM that meant over $2000 had gone up in smoke.

This doesn’t mean the original design team failed in their brief. Choosing a premium cable is the price of certainty and speed, and in physical product development those two things can be worth a high price.

"Design for Prototype" and "Design for Manufacture" are different sports, and this can be really challenging to communicate. We often design with manufacture in mind at the prototyping stage, but you can’t skip DFM. 

Optimise too early and you might slow down development, don’t optimise at all and you are leaving money on the BOM.

You don’t always need to redesign the product from the ground up to improve your margins. Sometimes all it takes is swapping a cable.