Eric Hiller published the first comprehensive product review of Galorath’s SEER Suite

 Product Cost in Industry, Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.), Spend Analytics, Total Cost of Aquisition, Total Cost of Ownership  No Responses »
Aug 072020
 

Good morning again, product and service cost management aficionados,

You’ve been waiting for it for awhile I’m sure ! Who doesn’t wait with bated breath for the next installment of knowledge in the product cost management world?  Our founder, Eric Hiller, has been very busy with a lot of things lately, but he just completed the herculean task of doing a deep dive review on the SEER by Galorath (published at Spend Matters, where he been filling out a whole series on PCM tools, started with two articles in December 2019 (here and here)

Those of you in the product cost management world, especially if you are in the aerospace and defense industries, know a lot about the SEER suite. It’s been around for over 30 years now, growth in products, depth, and breadth. Much like Eric’s review on aPriori, which was so deep we had to explode it into two parts, the Gallery app suite is so broad that’s been matters needed to split the article into two. Apparently, it’s also so valuable it’s behind their firewall.

Here they are!:

 

 

 

So, you may want to check it out. And if you can’t get there and still need some advice, give us a call and maybe we can help you.

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aPriori — PCM / Spend Analytics Solution Profile

 PCM Technique / Cost Models, Project Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.), Spend Analytics  No Responses »
Jun 092020
 

Hello again cost management aficionados!

Spend Matters just published Eric Hillers’s next deep dive on cost management tools — this time on the article reviewing aPriori.  They decided to break it into 2 articles.  The first one went up on June 8
It is behind their paywall, so you will only see a teaser of a few paragraphs, unless you have a subscription.
You all may remember that I did a two-part series on the history and landscape of PCM and Spend Analytics solutions with our good friends over at SpendMatters.com in December. You can find those jumping off point analysis here and here.

Please check it out over at Spend Matters. One caveat: I have been the victim of my own success in that Spend Matters thinks the article such good content that you will see a teaser article and then need to pass through their paywall to see the full analysis.

Here’s a teaser of some of the insight that you’ll get:

 

 

 

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What’s the Price (WTP) — PCM / Spend Analytics Solution Profile

 Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.), Spend Analytics  No Responses »
Mar 092020
 

Hello again cost management aficionados!

I would like to announce the first in my series of deep dive profiles on specific product cost management software solutions. You all may remember that I did a two-part series on the history and landscape of PCM and Spend Analytics solutions with our good friends over at SpendMatters.com in December. You can find those jumping off point analysis here and here.

As of late last week, we posted the first of our deep dives on one of the solutions, What’s the Price (WTP).  Please check it out over at Spend Matters. One caveat: I have been the victim of my own success in that Spend Matters thinks the article such good content that you will see a teaser article and then need to pass through their paywall to see the full analysis.

WTP is really intriguing as a software solution, so I hope you enjoy the analysis!

Here’s a teaser of some of the insight that you’ll get:

Click here to read more!

Eric A. Hiller

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That can’t be right!? (Linearity and Discontinuity in Pricing and Costing)

 Product Pricing, Project Cost Management, Uncategorized  19 Responses »
May 142014
 

Have you ever walked into a dining room with several pictures and seen that one picture that is not hanging parallel to the floor? If you’re a recovering engineer like me, you feel an overwhelming urge to correct the problem. You just can’t be comfortable until the frame is in alignment… unless you find your molding or floor/ceiling are not parallel.   Then you have bigger problems!

Why does a slight misalignment (maybe just a couple degrees off bubble) set off instant and loud alarm bells in your brain? It’s because the human brain is very sensitive to two things:

  1. Linearity/symmetry
  2. Discontinuity (especially non-monotonic functions)

I was having a lively discussion the other day with a director of pricing at a Fortune 500 distributor.  We were talking about how this affects product pricing. For example, when you have a catalogue with millions of products, it can be very challenging to keep pricing consistent. Consider the figure to the right. The orange dots could be product offerings for electric motors, graphed by the price vs. a performance attribute, such as horsepower. We expect price to increase with performance. But what happens when you find the blue or green dots?   The brain says “that’s not right!”Hiller_Associates_Costing_Linearity

Now, there may be legitimate reasons for the negative or positive arbitrage.   Maybe there is a sale? Maybe there is an economy of scale on selling that particular model?  However, that brings us to the next challenge, pricing functions that are not monotonically increasing (i.e. they have a negative slope for at least one product model). This is a problem, because this is difficult for even economies of scale to overcome. And, the customer does not like it, because it makes the vendor look as if their pricing is capricious, which causes distrust.

Discontinuity in Product Costing

This happens in costing too. For example, although “sunk cost” is an important concept in capital investment, it can wreak havoc on product costing. If a certain machine is fully depreciated and now has a greatly reduced overhead rate assigned by the accounting department, this will likely confuse the purchasing or engineering folks using a Product Cost Management software. It will either cause them to distrust the costing software or your manual analysis or it will drive them to cost all the parts they can using that

This is yet another curse of the difference between the data relevance needs in order to perform good cost or pricing analysis versus the data reliability needs, over which accountants typically obsess. From an accounting point of view the depreciated resource is “free” (or highly discounted). However, from a costing viewpoint, the abilities of that machine will have to be replaced sooner or later. Worse, the distortion in the overhead rate will lead to underestimations of cost, and often, unpleasant surprises late in product development and sourcing.

What to do about non-linearity, discontinuity, and non-monotonic pricing/costing functions:

Hiller_Associates_Fix_it_or_feature_itYou have a couple of choices on how to resolve the geometric costing/pricing problems in the minds of your customers or colleagues:

  1. Remove them – the first solution is to correct the false arbitrage by fixing the pricing or costing data. For example, in the case of the machine that is fully depreciated, change the overhead rate back to reflect the cost at which a new machine with the same capability would depreciate.
  2. Highlight them – if the pricing or costing curve has an unexpected kink in it for a legitimate reason, then you should make everyone aware of this and use it to your advantage. For example, in the catalogue motor example, advertise the sale and let people know this is not natural or permanent!

A lot of mistakes in pricing or costing are difficult to notice without close inspection, but remember anything that violates the brains desire for smooth regularity will stick out like a sore thumb… or a good deal.

 

 

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2012 Product Cost Management Revenue Assumptions

 Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.)  No Responses »
Apr 172013
 

 

Hello Internet and Product Cost Management industry! We’ve had strong interest in our latest article on the 2012 revenues of the Product Cost Management market. There have been several good questions that have made us want to clarify some of the assumptions in the analysis, so that people are clear on what is and is NOT included in the estimate.

 

Most importantly, this is an estimate of the REVENUE of the group of included vendors today in 2012. This does NOT represent the Total Addressable Market for Product Cost Management software.

The total addressable market is many times larger than the revenue of the included vendors that are estimated in 2012.  In fact, we plan to write follow-up articles that discuss the total addressable market, as well as the growth rate of the current vendors in reaching that total addressable market  Here’s some of the assumptions we made in the analysis:

  1. Only the Vendors noted are estimated – The uncertainties do not explicitly take into account other vendors. They reflect the fact that most of these are private companies whose numbers are not public and that vary from year to year. Obviously, it matters where one draws the line in the analysis.
  2. Focused on the estimation of manufactured products, not construction – there are many products in the market that focus on construction estimation, for example estimates for building an office building, an oil platform, a refinery, etc.  We consider this a wholly different market. In our own experience we have rarely if ever see the companies that specialize in construction estimation also compete for the same customers for which the companies listed in this Monday’s article compete.
  3. Not focused on job shops – there is also a separate market for software used by small “job shops.” These are small, mostly family owned businesses, that typically manufacture one type of part, for example sheet metal, machined castings, etc.  Some of the included vendors may sell to a few job shops, but there software is capable of being used by bigger enterprises.
  4. Generally Available Software – We only included vendors whose primary business involves selling a legitimate “generally available” software product (not a consulting business with internal tools)

Given these constraints, we believe this group represents over 90% of the revenue in the market today. If you know of other competitors who meet the criteria above and make over $2 million USD a year in revenue, let us know.

Keep the questions coming! We are glad there’s so much interest.

 

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2012 Revenues in the Product Cost Management Software Market

 Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.)  8 Responses »
Apr 152013
 

Hiller Associates received a question this week from a business school asking us what the revenue of the product cost management market is. That was a very interesting question, and one that we have thought about before. However, we’ve never actually sat down to think about the question formally. So rather than answer the person privately, we thought it might be helpful to everyone to discuss this in a public forum.

 

Product Cost Management Software Companies Hiller Associates

Companies included in the Revenue Aggregate

There’s good news and there is bad news with respect to the estimation of the size of the Product Cost Management market. The good news is that the market is fairly self contained, i.e. there are only a certain limited number of players in that software market. However, that’s where the good news ends. There are several challenges to estimating the market size:

  • Private companies -80% of the players in the product cost management software market are privately held companies, either venture funded, or privately held by a small group of founding owners and managers. Therefore, their revenue numbers are closely guarded information that is not publicly available. This includes the PCM company that our managing partner, Eric Hiller, founded and at which he was the CEO and then the Chief Product Officer for many years (aPriori).
  • Bundling – the second challenge comes with the fact that some of the larger players bundle product cost functionality into the price of another larger product. For example, Solidworks Cost is a bundled-free option that is included whenever someone buys their professional or premium level Solidworks CAD product.

There is is one other good piece of news, which is that Hiller Associates knows most of the players in the market and speaks with them regularly.  For some of them, we do know the revenue, and for others, we have a good idea. Obviously, we cannot share revenue numbers of an individual company, but this inside information will help us move the estimate from a wild guess to an educated guess.

Taking a look at the figure on the left, you will see the companies that we have included in the estimate. These are all the main players that we know of in the market. If there are others that we’ve missed, we’re very happy to learn about them and consider if we should add them to the market sizing.

2012 Revenues in the Product Cost Management Software Market

Those of you who follow this blog or have worked with Hiller Associates know that our philosophy is that point estimates are very dangerous and, often, not even that useful. Knowing the uncertainty around a cost number is just as important as having a point estimate of what that number is. We feel this holds true with any financial quantity. Therefore, we will provide a range of the size of this market.  Please see the figure on the right, which shows are estimate of the total revenue of the company’s above for 2012. When given the uncertainty factors that we have discussed above, we feel the total market has a large range. Total revenue could be as low as $60 million or as high as, perhaps, $115 million.

Current market revenue of Product Cost Management Hiller Associates

Click to Enlarge!

Other questions that people should ask are how much of this revenue comes from services and how much of this revenue comes from actual licensing of product. Some of the companies included are primarily product companies, and most of the services that they offer are tightly bound around the product. Such services would include training on the software, implementation, and customization. However, there are others in the group that also maintain general consulting businesses. For example, several of these companies offer classes about product cost or  subsets of product cost management, such as design for manufacturing & assembly (DFM/DFA).  These are general classes which only relate peripherally to their products.

Estimate Methodology

To do our estimate, our methodology was to estimate the revenue of each of the included companies individually. We also did an estimate of the service percentage of their revenue on an individual company basis. Then we added up the aggregate numbers. You will notice from the estimate figure to the right that when all the numbers for service and product revenue or aggregated, there is approximately a 60/40% split between product and service respectively. This ratio of product vs. service revenue seems approximately correct, per our experience in the market.

Software vs Services in Product Cost Management Hiller AssociatesIt’s important to understand, that this estimate is four the actual revenue of these companies in 2012. It does not reflect the total addressable market for product cost management software, which we believe is woefully on realize that this moment. This is the first our discussions about revenue in the product cost management software market.

NEXT TIME: Growth Rate in the Product Cost Management Software Market

 

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New Article by HA in Tech Clarity: PRODUCT COST MANAGEMENT AS A LINK BETWEEN ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

 PCM Technique / Cost Models, Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.)  No Responses »
Nov 052012
 

 

Last week, Hiller Associates published an article in Tech-Clarity with the title:

PRODUCT COST MANAGEMENT AS A LINK BETWEEN ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

Here’s an outline of the article:

  • Siemens PLM recently bought Perfect Costing Solutions from Tsetinis & Partner.  What does this mean?
  • To answer this, let’s first ask, what IS Product Cost Management and what does PCM software really “do”?
  • Now that we know what PCM software really does, who would value this in the Enterprise Software world?
  • There are look’s of possible categories of enterprise software that could value PCM software, but the most likely are PLM and ERP.
  • Product Cost Management software  is really a bridge linking the engineering language of physical things to the rest of the organization (purchasing, supply chain, finance, manufacturing, etc.) who primary speak the financial language of dollars.
  • If independent PCM software companies are not bought by a large PLM or ERP player, what are the other possible options for their future?

Here’s a teaser diagram from the article, just because who doesn’t like maps?

Product Cost Management Bridge from PLM to ERP Hiller Associates

Click to Enlarge! The position of PCM Software in the Enterprise World

 

My thanks to Jim Brown and Tech-Clarity for the publishing platform to discuss this subject – Eric Arno Hiller

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