Reduce steel tariff costs through product design optimisation

It depends heavily on how much engineering scrutiny the existing design has already had.

Products that have not been reviewed recently, quantitatively analysed or deliberately optimised often contain more scope for savings than designs that have already been engineered hard against current requirements and standards, using modern analysis methods and tools.

Even where straightforward material removal or FEA-led optimisation offers limited headroom, other cost-reduction levers may remain in the product architecture, specification, features, fabrication, assembly and make-or-buy decisions.

A reliable estimate normally needs sight of the existing design and supporting information. The more complete that information is, the more confidently the opportunity can be assessed. As a broad indication only, previous projects on this page have achieved steel-weight reductions of around 20–40% and total product-cost reductions around 20%, with the achievable figure varying substantially from product to product.

No. Cost reduction is carried out against the product’s actual current requirements, not by weakening them.

The first step is therefore to establish the design basis: the applicable regulatory requirements, standards, loads, functional needs, constraints and acceptance criteria that the product has to satisfy today.

If a formal design basis already exists, it provides a valuable starting point and can be reviewed and updated. If it does not, that basis has to be re-established from the available information, which adds work to the initial review.

The existing product can then be examined against that current basis specifically for opportunities to remove unnecessary cost, material, complexity or conservatism while still meeting the requirements that genuinely apply.

Not necessarily.

Existing suppliers, manufacturing capability and production arrangements can be treated as design constraints where changing them would introduce disproportionate cost, disruption or risk.

Where a change might create a worthwhile saving, the likely value can be assessed first so that the commercial case for changing supplier, process or manufacturing route can be weighed against the transition cost before anything is committed.

Frugal’s design philosophy is generally subtractive: simplify the product and strip it back towards the minimum needed to satisfy user needs and the actual design basis. In practice, that often means fewer parts, less material, fewer manufacturing operations and simpler demands on the existing supply chain, rather than adding new complexity or forcing wholesale changes to it.

Yes. Mature products can sometimes contain some of the best cost-reduction opportunities precisely because their design has become established and has not needed to be challenged for some time.

Design bases are not static. Requirements, standards, constraints, material costs, labour costs, energy costs, manufacturing methods and bought-out component costs all change. A product designed years ago may therefore be carrying decisions that made good sense then, but no longer represent the best answer today.

Re-establishing the current design basis creates a new benchmark against which the existing product can be reassessed for cost.

Occasionally that reassessment also identifies a separate issue: the established product may no longer fully satisfy a current requirement. That is a compliance problem rather than a cost-reduction opportunity, but it is better identified explicitly, and the two issues can often be addressed together as part of the same redesign programme.

Then the review has still done something useful: it has confirmed that the existing design is already in relatively good shape and that the obvious cost-reduction opportunities are unlikely to have been left on the table.

More often, though, the conclusion is not that no opportunities exist, but that the low-hanging fruit has already been exploited. Further savings may still be achievable, but they are likely to require either more radical concept redesign or more incremental detailed engineering, with greater development effort and investment needed to realise them.

At that point the question becomes commercial rather than purely technical: whether the likely saving is sufficient to justify the additional work, and whether it would leave the product in a stronger position on margin, competitiveness and longer-term commercial resilience.