THE DIGITAL COSTING
HIGHLIGHTS
Digital Costing is a major enabler for costs and carbon footprint reduction. D3S team developed an AI understanding the morphology of thousands of parts from engineering data (3D CAD, drawings, bills of material). Our algorithms and models then detect the possible manufacturing processes, to compute material procurement and transformation costs with a high level of details.
All is packaged in a modular generic software, highly scalable and currently used by hundreds of people in the aeronautic and automotive industries. It won the 2023 Digital Finance Award with our customer.
DATA & STACK
We leveraged x00’s of Gb of data, from engineering, procurement, costing, etc with multiple files formats (stp, png, pdf, txt, csv, …)
Hundreds of thousands parts and complex assy have been costed, in serial life and at earlier design stages.
Our Tech Stack includes : Python, PyTorch, React.JS, Mongo DB, Celery, Docker, Kubernetes, … and of course state-of-the-art librairies from our lab ;
CONTEXT & APPROACH
Costing function is at the heart of competitiveness
It allows to predict the costs of future products (financial costs and carbon footprint), design less expensive parts for the same level of value, buy at the right price, negociate supplier’s claims in a inflationary context. Being able to massively cost all products components is a must to track & optimize cost throughout life cycle.
We have delivered Digital Costing softwares fully taylored to our customer, in the aeronautic and automotive industries
A vehicle is composed of ~5000 parts with ~100 different technologies: Stamping, Elastomer, HPDC, machining, plastic injection, Electronic cards, etc. Aircrafts are of course larger, made of ~x00 000 parts with also 100 different technos: machining, sheet metal, composites, tubes & pipes, etc. In both industries, several hundreds of people deliver daily costing, using legacy tool. These tools are major assets but : generating high volume of low added value tasks, limiting capitalization, coverage and ultimately don’t capture all opportunities to reduce costs and carbon footprint.
Our Digital Costing approach is disruptive
It increases accuracy by massively extracting technical cost drivers from raw engineering data, thanks to the 3D AI developed in our lab. Efficiency is improved to optimize costing effort and identify automatically cost reduction opportunities. The collaborative Digital Costing platform is scalable across the whole costing organization (hundreds of users, multiple countries).
RESULTS & IMPACT
A successful digital transformation, recognized by CFO and acknowledged by “Digital Finance Awards” in both categories “Innovation” and “project of the year”
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- Efficiency: 60 à 80% of costing lead time reduction
- Accuracy: dozens of % gained with automatic vs. manual drivers’ extraction
- Spend coverage: 70% of vehicle cost is covered by the platform, including 30% in automatic
- RC reduction: several hundred in Mio€ identified as RC reduction opportunities
- People: cost analysts up-skilled and focused on added-value thanks to eradication of NVA tasks
- Sustainability: legacy tool obsolescence derisking
- Cross-functional : costing collaboration with engineering and procurement is reinforced
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In 18 months, solution is deployed to hundred of users with proven benefits
A first use-case in a few months to demonstrate the feasibility and ROI on limited perimeter (stamping technology). The solution is then progressively rolled out to other technologies (step-by-step), and full handed over to internal IT teams.