Planning & business case aspects for custom PSUs
Besides hard technical specs, projects are driven by NRE, amortization, contract risk and standards compliance. We found addressing below challenges early are a necessity for any successful project.
- Time-to-Market: T2M is often the key business driver, but hard to quantify. A common trade-off is to increase NRE to speed-up development, e.g. parallel R&D, back-up designs of high-risk modules, MVP realization.
- Hidden cost drivers e.g. operational impact of non-compliancy to PFC, EMI, and standards. These can lead to reduced performance of nearby systems or even penalties.
- Uncertainty in requirements: due to time pressure, we see often over-specification of hard specs and missing of norms/standards. Fixing this later in the project can dwarf per‑unit savings from catalogue parts. Additionally, compliance timelines and testing costs must be included in the business case.
- IP & ownership: determine who owns design IP and spare responsibilities; this affects long‑term sourcing and MRO cost.
- Risk allocation: milestone payments, acceptance tests, warranty caps, spares agreements and a production‑transfer plan reduce DMU exposure.
We emphasise here that these aspects must also make sense from our business perspective. Concretely, this means we only engage in projects that utilize our building blocks
and added value, and that we adhere to concurrent engineering principles.