COT - customer owned trouble

Increasingly, system houses are attracted to the customer-owned tooling (COT) model to gain more control of their schedules and costs. COT project risk and cost are high, often seeming more like customer owned "trouble," so the design team needs to be expertly prepared. The pathways to implement a COT design include (a) Manage the sourcing (internal or third party resources) of individual supply chain and cost reduction functions; (b) Use an integrated design-to-parts service; or (c) A hybrid of these two extremes. This panel will consider the pros and cons for each approach.