Now we'll look at the Whole Product-Life Costs through the prism of the PD discipline and see how the many cost drivers borne by both the producer and consumer can be affected by the decisions and strategy of the design and development process and how they can enhance the revenue gap.

There is an anecdotal assertion floating around the technology industry that claims that product architecture determines 60% of the product cost while product development determines 80% of its cost (including parts, labor, material overhead, quality, and product development costs) ³.   Thus, if 80% of a product's cost is designed into the product then it is very difficult to reduce the cost of an existing product without a redesign.  This then leaves production, support, marketing and sales to work out the remaining 20%.  This fits fairly well with my experiences, as far as production costs go - so there is evidence that up-front cost control during design are well worth considering.  Note, however, that the numbers cited above most likely do not reflect on-going costs associated with products after purchase, such as periodic upgrades, standard support, bug-corrections, product extensions, licensing costs, recycling costs, etc.

Cost Reduction through the prism of PD might be better called Cost Minimization (CM) based on the financial, structural and process suppositions assessed from budgeted costs for development, verification/validation, regulatory/environmental testing and anticipated costs of production, consumer usage, product support and other cost demands throughout the product lifecycle (i.e., anticipatory CR analysis).

So whatever nominal numbers are anticipated for various product types, we can at least bear witness that anticipatory CR analysis is well worth the effort in order to round up and corral potential cost varmints (cowboy language for 'unpleasant or despicable items').

As initially pointed out the product developer can understand almost all eventual product costs through the product design attributes, since they can be mapped directly to the various cost drivers encountered by both the producer and the owner over the whole life of the product.  When analyzing each attribute refer to the previous list of cost drivers to review the areas affected.