Assessing and Reducing Risk in Design: Cost to Manufacturer

The design process that follows a spiral approach is preferable to the current “loops,” which represent feedback. That is, the client can infer that the design is progressing, but in order to incorporate various viewpoints, it is losing ground (and costing more money and time). Often, however, a synergetic and innovative design never goes backward. In fact, better and, frequent, more cost‐effective features are being integrated into the project continuously. This goes beyond the “pay now versus pay later” decision, although consideration of the entire life cycle will save time and money, not to mention liabilities down the road, after completion (see Figure 8.20) (Vallero and Brasier 2008). Increased safety and sustainability can be gained by considering secondary costs in product and system design. This is the beginning of the life cycle perspective, especially when cost and impacts are considered in addition to financial measures.

Any improvement in safety as it relates to an engineered product is often accompanied by an increase in the cost of that product. On the other hand, products that are not safe incur secondary costs to the manufacturer beyond the primary (production) costs that must also be taken into account – costs associated with warranty expenses, loss of customer goodwill, and even loss of customers because of injuries sustained from the use of the product, litigation, possible downtime in the manufacturing process, and so forth (see Figure 8.20). It is therefore important for manufacturers and users alike to reach some understanding of the risks connected with any given product and know what it might cost to reduce those risks (or not reduce them).