Materials engineering is a powerful approach to reduce product costs. It's easier and less expensive to implement than many other approaches, and can sometimes be transformative.
Business leaders are always looking for ways to reduce product costs. Common approaches include lean manufacturing, global sourcing, and factory automation. But there’s also a powerful approach that is often overlooked – materials engineering.
Common causes of high product costs include
These problems are related to the materials used in a product. But materials engineering is rarely considered as an approach to cost reduction. This is ironic since materials account for up to 70% of a product’s cost.
Materials engineering is a powerful approach that's easier and less expensive to implement than other approaches. It often results in large ROI and sometimes can be transformative.
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Many products include components made of materials that are more expensive than necessary. Alternative materials are available that provide the needed performance and reliability, at lower cost. It’s best to identify and select lower-cost materials during product development, but sometimes making design changes when a product is in production is worth the effort.
Materials engineering has an important role during materials selection. Materials engineers have deep knowledge of different types of materials, their properties and costs, and how to evaluate materials to assess their suitability for an application. This knowledge helps them identify low-cost options that meet performance and reliability requirements for components.
Materials engineers work with mechanical and electrical engineers to help identify materials to use in components during product design. Trade-offs are made to identify materials and component geometry and features that optimize performance, reliability, and cost. For example, we helped a client reduce the cost of a component by replacing stainless steel with carbon steel that had a corrosion resistant coating..
Do you receive supplier quotes for custom fabricated components that are more expensive than expected? Or have suppliers refused your request for quote? The likely reason - the component will be a hassle to fabricate. Overlooking Design for Manufacturing considerations during component design is the likely root cause of the problem.
Design for Manufacturing is concerned with ease of component fabrication, and the materials selected for components are a big contributor to this. To keep fabrications costs low, and suppliers interested in your business, the materials selected should allow for easy component fabrication and the materials should be readily available. For every component fabrication process, some materials are easier to work with than others.
In addition to considering performance, reliability, and cost, materials engineers also consider ease of fabrication during the materials selection process. Again, working with mechanical and electrical engineers, trade-offs are made to identify materials and component geometry and features that optimize performance, reliability, and total cost. Total cost includes materials, fabrication, and costs of poor quality.
Finally, in addition to keeping fabrication costs low, ease of fabrication reduces the likelihood of quality problems that prevent meeting shipment schedules.
Quality problems lead to scrap, rework, and extra inspections. All are costly. So, quickly finding the root cause of quality problems and implementing corrective actions is critical to keep costs low. Materials engineers are a critical part of timely and successful root cause analyses.
The first step of a root cause analysis is to perform a failure analysis of the problem component or joint between components. The item is evaluated using various materials analysis techniques to determine whether the met specifications, whether there are metallurgical problems with the materials, and what happened to the materials.
The findings from a failure analysis point to the general cause of the quality problem. Then it is possible to identify the root cause and corrective actions.
For example, we worked on a quality problem that involved carbon steel tubing splitting when the tubing was bent to form components, resulting in 8% scrap. The failure analysis revealed that splitting occurred when the tubing carbon content was on the high end of the specification. Based on this, the specification for carbon content was reduced and the problem went away.
Materials engineers are trained in the analysis tools used for failure analysis. They also have experience selecting the analyses to perform for different situations and using the data to understand what happened to the materials that led to the quality problem.
Many organizations without materials engineers struggle to find the root cause of problems. In many cases, they don’t know how to perform a failure analysis. Without the information gained from a failure analysis, any effort to identify the root cause of a problem is just guessing. This is unproductive and the quality problems linger, and costs add up.
Every product is composed of materials. Materials that are engineered, shaped, and modified to produce components that are assembled into a product. So, materials engineering expertise is essential to optimize component performance, reliability, and cost. It is also essential for quickly solving quality problems.
Unfortunately, many companies do not have materials engineers on staff. Instead, engineers from other disciplines make decisions and solve problems that involve materials. These are skilled engineers. But they have little or no training in materials science and engineering. Also, their expertise is not in materials properties, selection, characterization, and processing. As a result, materials selection decisions are sub-optimum and quality problems linger. Materials engineering expertise is needed if you want to reduce product costs, while still making great products.
Leveraging materials engineering is a powerful approach for reducing product costs. And, it’s a relatively low-cost approach with a huge potential payback. There are many examples of lingering and costly problems being fixed when the total cost of the problem was more than 10 times the cost to perform a failure analysis and determine the root cause.
Also, the effort does not require a culture change, implementing a new engineering process, or extra training.
We work with companies to help them apply metallurgical engineering to reduce product costs by reducing the costs of the metals used in their products.
Here's how we help clients reduce product costs:
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Michael Pfeifer, Ph.D., P.E. is President of Industrial Metallurgists and a metallurgical engineering consultant with more than 30 years of experience in product design, manufacturing, failure analysis, and metallurgy training. He helps clients worldwide solve design and manufacturing problems and is the author of Materials Enabled Designs.
