Essentra Components

Essentra Components, a global manufacturer of plastic injection molded, vinyl dip molded, and metal items, built its competitive strategy around being a low-cost producer — a position that demands tight cost controls across a worldwide operation. Without a standardized costing system, generating quotes required labor-intensive manual calculations that took up to five hours per bid. This created bottlenecks in the bidding process and introduced inconsistencies when accounting for variables like material price changes and currency fluctuations. For an industrial components supplier operating at global scale, inaccurate or slow cost estimates translated directly into margin risk and lost revenue opportunities.

Essentra Components deployed Teamcenter Product Cost Management from Siemens as its global costing platform, integrating it directly into the bidding process across worldwide operations. The system provides an integrated calculation engine for both component and tooling costs, enabling cost estimators to generate accurate quotes and consolidate results through the built-in Profitability Analysis module. This module delivers a comprehensive view of cost structures, projected revenues, cash flow, and key performance indicators within a single platform. Critically, the solution models the impact of external variables such as raw material price swings and currency fluctuations, allowing finance teams to immediately approve financial offers without waiting on additional manual review rounds.

The headline outcome was cost savings of up to 10%, driven by improved cost visibility and more disciplined procurement decisions. The operational impact was equally concrete: quote generation time dropped from five hours to one hour per bid — an 80% reduction that materially accelerated Essentra's ability to respond to customer requests. The Profitability Analysis module gave cost estimators a structured framework for evaluating each project's plausibility, competitiveness, and risk exposure before submission.

• Up to 10% reduction in product costs through standardized, data-driven costing
• 80% faster quote generation — from 5 hours to 1 hour per bid
• Immediate financial offer approval, replacing multi-step manual review cycles
• Enhanced visibility into the effects of material price changes and currency fluctuations

• Standardizing cost estimation in the bidding phase delivers compounding value: faster quotes win more business while accurate cost data protects margins on each deal.
• A global costing platform must natively model currency and commodity price risk — local spreadsheet approaches cannot maintain consistency across multi-country operations.
• Embedding profitability analysis within the costing tool, rather than as a downstream step, reduces handoff errors and accelerates decision-making.
• Measure deployment success by operational metrics first: an 80% reduction in quote cycle time is a leading indicator that justifies investment before long-term margin improvements fully materialize.