Marquardt Group enhances product costing processes using Teamcenter

Providing innovative solutions

The term “flipping a switch” makes it all sound very easy, but the truth is a lot of work goes into making a good switch. It needs to be reliable, because it is the bridge between the user and the device.

The Marquardt Group (Marquardt) is a leading international manufacturer of electromechanical and electronic switches and switching systems. Marquardt operates in all major markets around the world, and has offices in 12 locations with more than 6,000 employees.

The automotive business unit of Marquardt is developing and producing innovative driver authorization systems, control panels, switches and assemblies. Marquardt has achieved a leading technological position on the world market. Its customers are mainly premium suppliers for the automotive industry.

Adopting a professional approach

Prior to using Teamcenter® software for product costing – from product lifecycle management (PLM) specialist Siemens Digital Industries Software – Marquardt didn’t have a continuous (integrated) costing system structure. Some employees used the existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for creating cost estimations, while others developed their own calculation tools using spreadsheet software.

So it was impossible to implement a consistent and standardized calculation methodology and process.

This posed a problem for Marquardt because the growing product complexity and increasing number of variants required more timely costing tools. Further, the controller’s office needed to reduce the time it took to create consistent cost statements. So it was clear to Marquardt that the only way they could create costs statements in a timely manner would be to adopt a professional calculation system.

Providing transparency

Marquardt determined that it needed a solution that would enable company-wide coordination of the calculation methodology, provide sustainable documentation of the calculations and reduce the time it took to create the calculations. The Teamcenter product costing solution proved to be very useful because it enabled Marquardt to preconfigure manufacturing processes and complex subassemblies with a high number of levels and hierarchies so cost data could be re-used by importing or dragging and dropping it into a new calculation.

It was also important for the company to not waste scarce resources developing and maintaining a spreadsheet-based system. In all, the major benefits of the Teamcenter product costing solution included time optimization, precision, repeatability and standardization.

These were the relevant success factors in choosing a solution, and the Teamcenter product costing solution proved to be the only technology that could meet all of these criteria.

“The Teamcenter product costing solution provides better transparency, more precise cost information and was well accepted by all departments and project teams,” says Karl Müller, the director of product design for automotive at Marquardt.

With the implementation of the Teamcenter product costing solution, the calculation department at Marquardt was able to implement the requirements of a broad spectrum of customers. Although some adjustments were made to the calculation methodology as well as how the master data was loaded, the system was up and running in only four weeks.

Standardizing costing

The user-friendly interface of the Teamcenter product costing solution was appreciated by the cost engineers, and the repeatable and comparable calculation results were highly valued by other departments.

Based on the reference data provided by the solution, such as location, materials, machines and manufacturing processes, Marquardt is also planning to support the purchasing department by analyzing prices for sourced parts.

Marquardt has standardized its worldwide costing at more than five locations with the help of the Teamcenter product costing solution. This way, corporate management can make consistent decisions based on company-wide information and activities. As a result, Marquardt can trace and monitor its costs throughout the entire product lifecycle.