We published a client result and an industry insight together this week, because one is the evidence for the other. The client is an aerospace and defense manufacturer with more than 2,000 technical components in scope, most of them made in annual quantities between 1 and 25 units. The analyzed supplier portfolio held 198 part numbers and over €550,000 in spend. COVALYZE analyzed 180 of them at part level, roughly 91% of the spend, and identified around 20% savings potential.
The customer had expected little or nothing. Part of that was reluctance to reopen supplier discussions in a volatile raw material market, where asking questions can invite new price increase demands. What the analysis found was more mixed than either “high” or “low”: the supplier was priced above should-cost on some parts, competitively on others, and in a few cases below calculated cost. Steel parts were consistently more competitive than GFRP parts, which fits a broader supplier base and stronger competition on the steel side. A category-level review would have averaged all of that away.
One finding reached beyond procurement. A cross-check between the 2D drawing data and the 3D geometry showed drawing weights at roughly half the values calculated from the model. The likely cause was a default density of 1.0 for GFRP in the customer’s PLM master data, against a realistic 1.9 or so for the material actually used. The corrected, higher weight went into the cost calculation, which kept the savings figure conservative. The data-quality signal now matters for logistics, transport and warehousing too.
The accompanying insight generalizes the case. When parts are diverse and volumes are low, average price-per-kilogram benchmarks break down, and only a transparent part-level cost logic survives a supplier’s scrutiny. Every part needs its own negotiation story.
