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Benchmarking

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From data to strategic decisions

FEV Consulting’s Benchmarking offering enables faster, evidence-based decisions across the product lifecycle by combining performance, design, and cost analysis of competitor products. Clients receive costed BOMs, KPI-based comparisons such as scatterbands, and interdisciplinary expert workshops. Real-hardware analysis, four global benchmark centers, and the proprietary carat database provide a robust basis for product targets, architecture choices, and cost decisions.

In many organizations, decisions across strategy, product development, and industrialization are too slow due to a limited and fragmented understanding of competitor products – especially from fast-moving markets such as China. Without clear visibility into how leading solutions are designed, integrated, and costed, teams struggle to define robust product targets, evaluate alternatives, and align across functions. This challenge affects the entire lifecycle:
from identifying new product opportunities and defining future concepts to setting cost targets, selecting technologies, and ensuring manufacturability. As a result, decisions are delayed or taken with higher uncertainty, increasing the risk of suboptimal product concepts and costly redesigns later in the lifecycle.

Why do teams struggle to define robust product targets and requirements across the lifecycle?

How does FEV Consulting’s Benchmarking enable fact-based target setting and decision-making across the lifecycle?

FEV Benchmarking connects technical product analysis with practical decision support across strategy, product development, cost optimization, and industrialization.

Understand competitor architectures

FEV Consulting performs teardown and design assessments to reveal how competitor products are engineered at system and component level. Architecture layouts, integration concepts, materials, manufacturing choices, and technical features show not only what competitors do, but which design principles drive their solutions.

Quantify positioning with KPI-based benchmarking

FEV Consulting uses comparable KPIs and scatterbands to position products across performance, design, and cost dimensions. Based on structured data from vehicle, system, and component benchmarks, these comparisons reveal best-in-class solutions, recurring patterns, and relevant outliers. Clients use the results to validate assumptions and define realistic product targets.

Enable cost-aware decisions

Costed BOMs and detailed cost breakdowns create transparency regarding the key cost drivers in both material and manufacturing costs. FEV Consulting leverages these insights to execute target costing and design-to-cost projects. Within cost reduction initiatives, FEV Consulting supports clients throughout the entire process, from idea generation to the implementation of cost reduction measures and supplier negotiations.

Translate insights into decisions

Benchmarking insights are translated into decisions through interdisciplinary workshops and direct interaction with real hardware at four FEV Consulting benchmark centers worldwide. FEV consultants, engineers, and cost experts work with client teams to evaluate alternatives, challenge assumptions, and align on technically feasible product and cost targets.

Scale insights through FEV Consulting's proprietary benchmarking database, carat

Benchmarking results are consolidated in carat, FEV Consulting’s proprietary benchmarking database. With currently more than 60 datasets and 700 vehicle profiles, carat enables consistent KPI comparisons, target setting, and the reuse of design, performance, and cost insights across products and projects.

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What scale of benchmarking expertise and data does FEV Consulting provide?

FEV Consulting combines global benchmark centers, recurring product analyses, and structured datasets to provide scalable benchmarking insights across products, systems, and components.

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benchmark centers worldwide in Germany, the US, China, and India
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vehicle benchmarking programs annually
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benchmarking datasets available in carat database
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vehicle profiles available in carat database

Case samples

How is benchmarking applied in real product and business decisions?

Defining battery concepts through KPI-based benchmarking

An automotive OEM needed to position an early traction battery concept against competing solutions and define robust performance and cost targets. FEV Consulting compared the client’s concept with a reference dataset of more than 30 high-voltage battery packs, using scatterbands for indicators such as energy density, cost per kilowatt-hour, and system integration approach. The analysis revealed the concept’s position within relevant benchmark ranges, identified best-in-class solutions, and highlighted the implications of cell-to-pack and cell-to-module architectures. The results provided a fact-based foundation for concept selection and translated strategic product objectives into concrete performance and cost targets before final specification.

We designed our Benchmark Centers as places where people from different disciplines can come together around real hardware, challenge assumptions, and learn from each other. This collaborative exchange is where benchmarking creates the greatest value.

Alexander Koch

Senior Manager and Head of Benchmark Center Aachen

Frequently asked questions

Many benchmarking approaches stop at comparing specifications. FEV Consulting combines real-hardware analysis, performance data, engineering interpretation, cost transparency, interdisciplinary workshops, and the carat database. This allows clients not only to understand competitors, but to translate evidence into product targets, architecture choices, and cost decisions.

Benchmarking is most valuable in early decision phases, when defining product concepts, setting performance and cost targets, or evaluating new business opportunities. It provides a fact-based foundation before major investments are made and is equally relevant for portfolio decisions, design-to-cost optimization, and industrialization planning. Typical applications include:

A new vehicle program starts and target values for cost, weight, performance, or package space need to be defined
Development teams need to choose between competing technical concepts before design freeze
Products in production are reviewed for cost reduction and value engineering opportunities
A product has been on the market for several years and needs to be reassessed against newer competitor solutions
A company is evaluating entry into a new technology field or market segment and needs to identify attractive applications and positions in the value chain

Benchmarking is sometimes perceived as backward-looking, but real products provide the most reliable evidence of what is technically feasible, commercially available, and competitive today. FEV Consulting does not replicate existing solutions. It reveals the design principles, cost drivers, performance trade-offs, and technology choices behind them so that clients can define future targets based on evidence rather than assumptions. In one project, FEV Consulting benchmarked an early battery concept against more than 30 high-voltage battery packs and used the results to define performance and cost targets before the final product design was established.

FEV Consulting covers performance, design, and cost analysis at vehicle, system, and component level. Depending on the scope, deliverables include KPI comparisons and scatterbands, teardown and architecture analyses, costed BOMs, cost-driver assessments, and interdisciplinary workshops using real hardware.

The carat database is FEV Consulting’s centralized benchmarking intelligence platform, providing structured access to design, performance, and cost data across hundreds of benchmarked products. It enables consistent KPI-based comparison, supports target definition, and allows teams to reuse insights across projects, transforming benchmarking from one-time analysis into a scalable decision platform.

FEV Consulting accelerates decision-making by providing immediate access to proven market references instead of relying on assumptions. Our clients can quickly compare alternative concepts, define realistic targets, and understand cost and performance trade-offs based on existing competitor solutions.

This helps align engineering, purchasing, and strategy teams earlier, enabling faster concept selection and target definition.

AI supports benchmarking by accelerating data analysis, identifying patterns across large datasets, and enabling faster comparison of design, performance, and cost metrics. At FEV Consulting, AI is applied on structured benchmarking data in the carat database, allowing users not only to analyze data efficiently but also to interact with it – for example by querying, exploring, and “chatting” with benchmarking datasets to retrieve relevant insights.

However, AI does not replace expert interpretation. The value of FEV Consulting’s Benchmarking lies in combining data-driven insights with engineering expertise and consulting-driven evaluation, ensuring that our results provide a clear basis for product, cost, and strategic decisions.

Benchmarking is delivered through both client-exclusive projects and shared benchmarking programs or subscription models, depending on the use case. While our exclusive projects enable tailored analysis for specific products or strategies, shared programs provide access to FEV Consulting’s extensive benchmark datasets across multiple products and technologies at an attractive price.

This approach allows our clients to combine customized insights with large-scale benchmark data, ensuring both high decision relevance and cost-efficient access to benchmarking intelligence.

Get in contact
with our team

Alexander Koch

Senior Manager and Expert in Benchmarking

Christian Speuser

Director and Expert in Benchmarking

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Why do teams struggle to define robust product targets and requirements across the lifecycle?