Magsafe

While at moment I was tasked with reducing the costs on many different projects. Inflation was driving up the raw material costs on magnets and labor and we were trying to keep the product costs from rising too much. I targeted the line of magsafe mounts as one potential area that could benefit the most because of all the expensive magnets used in them. There are more than 10 different end products in this line.

My goals were:

• Maintain or improve quality where possible

• Reduce the magnet costs as this was the most expensive part of the product

• Standardize and reduce as many parts as possible

• Lower machining time and assembly time

The most effective way to reduce costs on magnets is to use smaller magnets. I still needed to maintain the strength though so I had to adjust and tune the magnet grade with the thickness and a custom designed shunt. I was able to reduce the magnet cost by 60% and slightly improve the strength.

My solution for other material costs was to group the products into two different main categories based on their function and then design different injection molded housings for each one. This lowered the bulk of the aluminum raw material costs. It did still require specific inserts for each mount but since the overall size was greatly reduced and standardized it reduced the costs significantly.

The end result was quickly implemented into production and it was able to be swapped into the web store without any fanfare because the new products were nearly indistinguishable from the originals. This was a huge success for the company and the customers.