Design To Value : What is it?
Design to Value (DTV) is an initiative to improve the value of products and services for clients to match with the price they are willing to pay, while achieving cost objectives. This multi-dimensional methodology leverages on innovation and competitiveness to address the right needs and increase profitability.
Design to Value is a strong & effective approach to meet the following challenges:
- Provide increased value & new features for the customer
- Drastically reduce your costs & boost your operating margins
- Maintain existing products in a mature phase & capture new business opportunities
- Compete with aggressive players & new market entrants
Kusting has developed a unique methodology, customizable by industries and applicable to both existing products/services and new developments, to get the most out of the DTV approach. This cross-functional approach is based on the 4 following rules:
1. Focus on the clients: what do they truly value?
Most companies listen to their customers to develop and produce their products and services. But do they ask the right questions? How do they interpret the answers?
Feeling that you are identifying market expectations does not mean that you are achieving the expected conversion. In design to value approaches, it is frequently observed that there is a significant loss of value between the customer’s expectations, the interpretation of marketing, the design related to these requirements, and the final result after production. In the end, this leads in a gap between what the customer is willing to pay and what is offered.
This “chain of misunderstanding” can directly impact the viability of the product. Valuable resources are then spent on Marketing, R&D and production to readjust empirically and iteratively. The willingness to pay of customers are then met but very often at the sacrifice of direct costs and product profitability.
Therefore, companies would benefit from identifying at the early stage the convertibility of customer needs in terms of product value. To achieve this, Kusting has developed a unique methodology, combining multiple proven techniques and advanced tools.
2. Unleash your potential for maximum design benefits
In a conventional product/service development approach, the design phase consists of a point-to-point transformation of market requirements into design in an iterative way. The number of scenarios studied and tested is too low, often due to the same constraints: lack of time, uncertainty & risk taking, difficulty in evaluating scenarios, lack of trust and commitment…
In opposite ways, Design to Value approach allows the lifting of these constraints to have real alternatives of functions, aesthetics, materials, number of parts, ease of manufacture, number of suppliers to be requested… but also to link these new scenarios to the customers’ willingness to pay, if the first phase has been successfully performed.
For example, competition analysis is still too often based on technical specifications, which leads to generally poor results. While the Design to Value works with functional competitive analysis, based on the perceived value of the customer and generates much more interesting ideas.
Kusting offers a panel of powerful creativity & analysis tools to enable teams to unleash their full potential and generate multiple design scenarios with much more value.
3. Turn your supplier portfolio into an ecosystem of business partners
In a Design to Value approach, strengthening the relationship with partners and suppliers is essential, compared to the conventional processes based on internal Purchasing strategies. This Open Innovation initiative creates a win-win relationship and makes it possible to design a product in close collaboration. This approach is based on 3 main actions: selecting the right suppliers, developing the partnership strategy, and leveraging on creativity tools to unleash their full potential.
New opportunities are created by exploiting all the supplier’s know-how, expertise and good practices. Most of the time, these are concrete and realistic scenarios as the suppliers are committed and leverage on existing skills. This allows to master technical feasibility, planning, costs and risks. The benefits on the product are numerous: improved design, reduced production costs, multiple negotiation levers for purchasing…
To achieve this objective of Open Innovation with suppliers, the Design to Value approach enables some challenges to be met. Above all, it allows books to be opened in complete transparency. Then, it completes the ideas internally generated but among suppliers by identifying new design scenarios. Finally, the approach makes it possible to create a state of mind and trust that commits the supplier to the expected objectives.
Thanks to Kusting experience, co-design workshops and the development of innovative strategies with your suppliers are an excellent way to integrate maximum value into the product/service at the lowest cost.
4. Do not consider manufacturing as a last step
In traditional workflows, product design plans are delivered to the production department and then reviewed iteratively. Too often, manufacturing constraints still lead to a rethinking of designs, threatening the profitability of products. Manufacturing processes are not always agile enough to respond to a volatile market and with shortened cycles, while industrial equipment requires heavy investments.
in a Design to Value approach, 3 main levers are used to overcome these issues: integrating production into co-engineering, integrating the full digital potential of Industry 4.0 and leading a DTV approach with industrial equipment suppliers.
Co-engineering production reduces the gap between design and production and thus integrates more value into the product. The levers of industry 4.0 allow to improve significantly in productivity but also often in terms of quality at the same time. As seen previously with Open Innovation with subsystem / component suppliers, the same creativity and partnership levers activated with industrial equipment suppliers make it possible to bring the same benefits on the production chain.
To achieve these benefits, Kusting offers you a methodology to meet several key conditions. Change development processes to take advantage of production as early as possible, define a roadmap for digitizing manufacturing means and establish a partnership strategy with industrial equipment suppliers.