Case Study
Managing costs is becoming even more important these days due to various effects that are changing the way forward across all industries. In this case, our client – a world leading system automotive supplier – was facing a huge challenge to get a new product development back on track, both technically and commercially.
Besides first cost status, sales price gap, technical issues and staffing of such a big program turned out to be critical
Therefore, the top management of a world leading system supplier asked for support in one of their largest development programs – one of the biggest challenges in the company’s history. A new technical development with an extremely large and difficult to manage project organization faced the challenge of turning tight sales targets into a technical and commercial success story.
The biggest challenges from the very beginning of the program
- Complexity increase based on modular construction system of conventional and various hybrid drive solutions
- This new product was already negotiated with multiple OEMs with clear expectations of acceptable cost, especially for the hybrid solutions
- Latest internal business case simulations showed a significant profitability decrease and further technical risks
- Complex project organization with about 200 people over four business units already installed
What makes this situation so much more complex compared to other projects?
How did we approach this challenge to overcome the criticality?
The need for fast and structured profitability programs was clear from the very beginning. We agreed with our client to set up a task force and the initial task was to run a health check to identify the fields of action.
The biggest question at first was how to identify all critical areas and to work on them at the same time without losing the necessary speed to meet all SOPs.
What was key to success within this task force?
A wide set of optimization levers was key to success
The holistic end-to-end VA / VE profitability program covered:
- Target Costing
- Benchmarking
- Design to Cost
- Complexity MGMT
- Make-and-Buy analysis
- Advanced negotiations
- Invest Optimization
- Strong PMO
- Measure tracking
- Sales Support
+ an unbiased support of the executive management with full support within the realization phase until SOP
A holistic Profitability Program helped our client position themself to reach ambitious targets
The client benefits were significant:
- Improvement of the previous strained business case toward 10,6 percent contribution margin today, i.e. worth 2.6 billion euro
- Improvement of the business case even beyond the additional five percent contribution margin
- One-time payments were reduced by around 300 million euros. Further commitments and measures reduced the one-time payments by around 200 million euros
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Thomas Plasa
Partner
Profitability & Efficiency Programs
Turnaround Management & Restructuring
Strategy Development & Organizational Performance

Christoph Wotzka
Senior Principal
Profitability & Cost Out Programs
Holistic Product Cost Optimization
Strategy & Organization Development