Eric Hiller shares an article on the top mistakes made in product cost management and design to value.  Product cost management (PCM) and design-to-value (DtV) are two areas in companies capable of delivering the greatest of impact, but are sadly prone to the biggest blunders by leadership. Eric A. Hiller, the managing partner of Hiller Associates and a specialist in product development and procurement, has unveiled some of the crucial errors that even the elite executives tend to commit…

  Eric Hiller shares how his experience as a new father reminds him of how one has to adjust and adapt using knowledge learned from lean manufacturing and agile product development. Coronavirus has changed a lot of things in America—especially in urban areas, where there are heightened precautions. It is even more chaotic when you have your first newborn baby, like my wife and me. Babies are very different from manufacturing floors; however, there are certain processes that must be…

  Eric Hiller exposes the biggest blunders leaders make when it comes to product cost management and design to value.  Product cost management (PCM) and design-to-value (DtV) are two areas in companies capable of delivering the greatest of impact, but are sadly prone to the biggest blunders by leadership. Trying to save one’s way to growth As great as product cost management and some of its sub disciplines like should-costing are at increasing your profit, but they will not grow…

  Eric Hiller recently published the first article in a series for Industry Week. This week, the article  focuses on how an executive (and other people who are not cost experts) can understand what the cost management team is communicating. We have all been in a meeting where miscommunication happens. One of the biggest challenges when dealing with analytics in business is that the more powerful the analytics, the harder it is to explain to other people not involved directly…

  Eric Hiller takes a look at the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education and discusses the pros and cons of online learning.    “With the advent of our unfriendly visitor from Wuhan, the COVID-19 virus, a lot of things have changed. Higher education has been particularly hard hit. I could not find a complete list of colleges and universities in the USA that were closed, but one can get a pretty good qualitative sense of the effect,…

  Eric Hiller provides a short introductory article and a link to a forthcoming webinar on Thursday, May 28, 2020, that explains how to keep a supply chain up and running during COVID-19 and into the future.  The old world… So, you had a supply chain, and you thought it was pretty “optimized.” Yeah, you could improve it here and there, but you had wrung out 95%+ of the addressable waste. To really make progress, you would need to make…

  Eric Hiller unrolls a few facts behind the need to hoard toilet paper (TP) as he shares his knowledge on the supply chain in this article recently published on MarketWatch. One of the bizarre phenomena that we have been experiencing in the United States during the visit of our unfriendly visitor from Wuhan, the SARS-COV-2 virus which causes COVID-19 disease, is the strange behavior of people to irrationally hoard toilet paper (TP). I admit, this is one thing that…

  Eric Hiller’s company blog takes a look at the strategy and growth probability of the Ride-hail market from the perspective of the Lyft CEO. Summary for Lyft CEO Ride-hail is not going away, but it must to get profitable.   You can try to ‘grow to profitability’, but as we have learned in the past, that is a risky proposition. Uber is expanding, but it is already bigger than Lyft.   Is that strategy profitable, and if it is,…

Umbrex is pleased to welcome Eric Hiller to our community.  Eric is the managing partner of Hiller Associates, the leading consulting firm specializing in product cost management (PCM), should-cost, design-to-value and software product management. He is a former McKinsey & Company engagement manager and operations expert. Before McKinsey, Mr. Hiller was the co-founder and founding CEO of two high technology start-ups: aPriori (a PCM software platform) and TADA.today. Before aPriori & TADA, he worked in product development and manufacturing at Ford…

In this two-part series, Eric Arno Hiller interviews Spend Matters founder, Jason Busch, about the growth of the market of Product Cost Management software and the state of the art today.   A lot has happened in the world of procurement software in the last 20 years. Purchasing has added a lot of new tools to what was mostly a relationship-focused discipline. These developments include: Data-rich environments of spreadsheets, MRP and ERP systems Supply chain management and supplier relationship management…