Faster Decisions. Lower Cost. Better Products.

Creating winning products

Product development is under pressure. Costs rise, complexity grows and decisions slow down. We help organisations industrialise product development, connect engineering with financial impact and build products that are smarter, faster to develop and lower in cost.

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PRODUCT IMPACT

Fixing What Slows Engineering Down

Product Improvement strengthens value creation where product decisions have the biggest operational and financial effect. Many organisations struggle with elaborated and delayed development cycles, missing engineering transparency, overengineering, rising complexity, and siloed collaboration.

We address this at the source. We connect product architecture, cost logic, governance and delivery processes to enable faster decisions, lower cost and more scalable products. The result is not only greater efficiency in development, but better product economics across the lifecycle.

1

Where Value is Lost Today

  • Cost is largely locked in during design, with limited visibility
  • Engineering decisions are made without integrated cost-performance trade-offs
  • Designs accumulate unnecessary complexity and legacy constraints
  • Limited reuse due to lack of modularisation and standardisation
  • Optimisation happens too late
2

What Is Missing

  • Design-stage visibility on cost and value impact
  • Systematic identification of optimization opportunities
  • Standardised and modular design principles across products
  • Consistent decision framework across teams
  • Scalable approach to apply learnings across portfolios
3

How we improve it

  • Design becomes a lever for cost and performance, not just function
  • Engineers make faster, better-informed trade-offs
  • Complexity is reduced structurally, not incrementally
  • Designs become more modular and reusable
  • Savings and improvements are scalable across products

Delivering Measurable Results

Product Improvement works when decisions become faster, cost becomes visible earlier and complexity is reduced with discipline. We focus on product economics, engineering efficiency and architecture choices that hold up in execution.
Up to 50%
Lower development costs
>40%
Improvement in engineering efficiency
50%
Faster time-to-market

A Focused Portfolio for Better Products

We improve product development where complexity, cost pressure and engineering performance meet. Our work combines technical depth with economic logic and creates measurable impact across the lifecycle.

Engineering Efficiency

Accelerating product development through better decision logic, clearer interfaces, stronger cross-functional steering and more efficient engineering processes.

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Cost Value Engineering

Creating transparency at component, function and specification level to reduce cost early and link engineering choices to customer value and business impact.

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Modularisation and Standardisation

Reducing variants, increasing reuse and building scalable product architectures with standard modules, interfaces and platform logic across product families.

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Digitalisation and AI

Using data, digital tools and AI where they improve engineering productivity, scenario transparency and decision quality in a measurable way.

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Awarded Services

H&Z supports industrial companies in improving engineering performance, reducing product cost and building scalable product architectures that strengthen competitiveness under pressure.
Hidden Champion 2026/27
Top Consulting Firm 2025 logo – client reference | H&Z
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Successful Product Improvement Projects

Clients benefit from faster engineering decisions, lower product cost and clearer product governance. Success stories show how targeted improvement in architecture, cost logic and development processes creates measurable gains in speed, transparency and scalability.

Success Story
 

Collaborative workshops guide public transport operators in Germany to identify and assess innovative business models for future mobility solutions.

All H&Z Success Stories

Our latest Insights

Stay up to date with perspectives, best practices and proven approaches in product cost reduction, engineering efficiency and product development improvement.
All H&Z Insights
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24.03.2026
 | Munich

At our CTO Roundtable in Munich, we exchanged ideas with executives on technology, engineering, innovation and R&D.

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18.09.2025

Discover how to boost engineering efficiency by up to 35% with five strategic levers that drive innovation and meet customer demands.

Product Improvement

Let us help achieve your objectives

If you want to reduce product cost, improve engineering performance or create more scalable product architectures, our experts are ready to support you.

Christian Koehler

Partner
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Harald Jordan

Partner