Getting an engineered product to market forces organizations to manage change.  Change manifests itself in materials, specifications, style, process, supplier selections, and variations of many other product attributes that affect cost.  Most of the time costs related to change are not kept visible, and lead to 'no change' and loss of profitability.

What might these costs include?  For illustration, let's assume a company averages 100 Engineering Changes (ECs) per year on a particular product line.  Typically, a team of 4 people will invest at least 3 hours each of productive time toward the processing of each EC.  The direct cost per EC would therefore be $50/hr*3hrs*4persons, or $600/EC.  Assuming 100 ECs per year, annual expense is $60,000 related only to labor for processing ECs in one product line.  Moving from a paper-based system to I-PROCESS has shown the ability to reduce labor costs for processing ECs by more then 50% for an annual direct savings of $30,000 per product line.

Providing a high level of visibility to active ECs can also reduce the number of lost or erroneous ECs.  A mistake in ordering the wrong prototype or selecting the wrong supplier can easily cost $25,000 each.  Avoiding just three unprocessed or incorrectly processed ECs could save an additional $75,000 annually.

Looking forward, visibility into the past production history (such as provided by I-PROCESS) in the support of the development of future products has shown the ability to also reduce the total number of required changes by as much as 20%.

Over and above these direct cost savings are the more strategic (and most probably, more vital) advantages of a systematic and self-documenting process that allows companies to get products developed and to market faster.

Largerl I-PROCESS implementations require approximately $110,000 investment (software licenses, implementation support labor, 3-years of maintenance/enhancements/support).  The direct return-on-investment over a 3-year period  [(3x$1,100,00)/$110,000] would therefore be on the order of 30-to-1.