For every €1 invested in cost engineering, companies get €10 to €100 back. So why do most still miss the savings? Because they start too late.

Severin Heimrath, Managing Director at AWS Innovation Partners, has spent 15 years inside manufacturing organizations and keeps seeing the same pattern: treating cost engineering as a procurement tool instead of a design tool. By the time a product reaches negotiation, 80-90% of its costs are already determined because engineering decisions, tolerances, and supplier choices have locked in the cost structure.

In this episode, Severin shares what actually drives results:

☑️ Why cost engineering must start in early product development

☑️ How centralized data and cross-functional collaboration outperform Excel estimates

☑️ Where AI helps and where human expertise still wins

☑️ And how leading teams consistently achieve 10–100x ROI

The technology exists, and the methods are proven. The only question is: are you starting early enough?