Insight Consumer hardware Engineering & NPI

Component platforms beat component discounts

September 14, 2023 · 1 min read · By Oliver Grant

Negotiating a resistor costs a week; standardizing one saves every future week. When a consumer audio family moved from 22 shared components to 118, the bill-of-materials saving was 9 percent — but the launch calendar improvement was worth more.

Platform decisions belong at design review two, made by the person who owns the roadmap, not the person who owns this quarter's cost target.

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