Caresoft Global has received two Innovation awards in the 2025 Just Auto Excellence Awards for Eureka, its patent-pending, expert-backed platform that helps OEMs and suppliers realize efficiencies in cost, mass, and assembly time. The awards recognize Eureka’s impact in Cost Optimization for standardizing how opportunities are identified, validated, and implemented, and in Product Development for enabling earlier, cross-functional decisions grounded in teardown and benchmarking intelligence. This article sets that recognition in context, outlining the industry pressures that make these capabilities material and how Eureka addresses execution.
The global automotive industry is navigating one of the most disruptive periods in its history. Electrification, intense competition, shifting supply chains, and regulatory pressures are forcing companies to rethink how they operate. Yet amid all this change, three imperatives endure: reducing cost, vehicle weight, and assembly time.
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These are not outdated concerns. They are the very metrics that determine competitiveness and survival in a market where margins are thin, investment needs are enormous, and rivals move faster than ever. Automakers that can lower material costs, engineer lighter vehicles, and shorten build times will have the flexibility and resources to lead in this transition.
This article sets this recognition in context, outlining the pressures amplifying these fundamentals and how Eureka addresses execution.
Why Cost, Mass, and Time Still Rule
Cost: The currency of competitiveness
Automotive is a capital-intensive industry where margins are often razor thin. Rising raw material prices, high energy costs, and ongoing investment in electrification make cost reduction critical. Every euro saved per vehicle translates into direct improvement in profitability and reinvestment capacity. Cost efficiency is no longer a back-office goal—it is a boardroom priority.
Mass: Every gram counts
Vehicle weight affects performance, safety, and efficiency. With internal combustion, lighter vehicles reduce fuel consumption. When it comes to electric vehicles, mass reduction is even more strategic: it extends range or enables a smaller, cheaper battery. A lighter EV can be priced more competitively while still meeting customer expectations for range.
Time: The battle for speed
The faster an automaker can design, build, and launch a vehicle, the more competitive it becomes. Assembly time impacts cost per unit and throughput, while development time dictates how quickly new models reach the market. Reducing hours per vehicle and cutting months from development cycles are now as vital as reducing emissions or improving performance.
Together, cost, mass, and time form a triad of imperatives. A smart design change that reduces part count can simultaneously lower cost, trim weight, and simplify assembly. Companies that align around this mindset gain compounding benefits.
External Pressures Intensifying the Imperatives
- New global competitors
New entrants—especially those from high-growth markets such as China, have redefined what fast, frugal product development looks like. They launch vehicles in record time and at aggressive price points, forcing incumbents to rethink their efficiency baselines.
- Supply chain volatility
From chip shortages to raw material spikes, recent years have shown how fragile global supply networks can be. Building resilience often comes at a premium. To afford redundancy, OEMs must be more disciplined in finding efficiencies elsewhere.
- The EV and technology transition
Electrification demands staggering investment in batteries, platforms, and software. At the same time, EVs are often heavier and less profitable than combustion vehicles. Only by cutting waste and optimizing design can automakers sustain profitability while funding the future.
Strategies OEMs Are Pursuing
- Lean manufacturing: Eliminating wasteful steps, optimizing plant layouts, and embracing automation to boost throughput.
- Platform consolidation: Modular vehicle architectures spread costs across multiple models and cut complexity.
- Lightweighting: Using advanced steels, aluminum, composites, and topology optimization to save mass without excessive cost.
- Design for manufacturability: Gigacasting and part consolidation reduce assembly steps and simplify supply chains.
- Digital tools and AI: Virtual simulations and generative design accelerate development and reveal non-obvious cost/weight savings.
Introducing Eureka: Caresoft Global’s Cost Reduction Platform
While strategies abound, the challenge has always been execution. Automakers know opportunities exist across every system, but identifying them consistently and implementing them early is difficult. Traditional cost-down workshops often come too late in the cycle, after key design decisions are locked in. This is where Eureka changes the game.
Eureka is Caresoft Global’s patent-pending, expert-backed cost-reduction software platform. It is the first-of-its-kind intelligent idea exchange for OEMs and suppliers, built to help teams systematically discover, evaluate, and implement opportunities to reduce cost, mass, and assembly time. Its mission is simple: do it right the first time—and fast.
How Eureka Works
A living catalog of cost-reduction ideas
At its core, Eureka hosts a continuously expanding catalog of cost-saving and lightweighting ideas drawn from global vehicle teardowns, benchmarking data, and expert insights. Each idea is structured for easy adoption:
- Title & System details: System, subsystem, and part are clearly identified.
- Idea description: Concise explanation of the design change or improvement.
- Idea insights: Context on technical rationale and trade-offs.
- Illustrations: Visual comparisons between less efficient and recommended designs.
- Impact assessment: Estimated savings in cost, mass, assembly time, or complexity.
- Implementation effort: Rated short, medium, or long.
- Applicability matrix: Shows where the idea is already applied and where it could be applied.
Expert guidance on demand
Every idea is backed by technical experts. Through the “Ask an Expert” feature, users can directly consult experts to understand feasibility, risks, or adaptation for their unique context. This bridges the gap between data and decision-making.
Continuous intelligence feed
Eureka is powered by real-time teardown projects from Caresoft’s global technology centers. This ensures the platform always reflects the latest competitor benchmarks, new innovations, and emerging best practices.
Collaborative ideation
Beyond static data, Eureka acts as a collaborative workspace. Teams across engineering, procurement, and manufacturing can co-create solutions, evaluate trade-offs, and track implementation progress together, breaking down silos and fostering a culture of cost leadership.
Applicability early in the cycle
One of Eureka’s biggest advantages is timing. By delivering actionable insights early in product development, it helps teams avoid the “lost opportunity” curve, where cost-saving potential drops sharply after design freeze. With Eureka, optimization happens up front, when changes are easiest and cheapest to implement.
Value for Different Stakeholders
- For CXOs: Eureka creates a culture of cost leadership by showing how competitors solve problems differently and empowering leadership teams with real-time insights.
- For Subject Matter Experts: It provides unparalleled access to global benchmarks, helping experts reframe system constraints and find new benchmarks to work against.
- For Design Engineers: It delivers smarter tools and decision support, enabling engineers to design efficient solutions quickly without sacrificing quality.
Challenges Eureka Solves
| Industry Challenge | How Eureka Helps |
| High-cost pressures | Provides actionable cost-saving ideas |
| Fast-changing innovation cycles | Delivers continuous updates from fresh teardowns |
| Intense global competition | Shares proven benchmarks from multiple markets |
| Disconnected teams, siloed data | Enables collaborative ideation across functions |
| Information overload | Filters and prioritizes insights for fast action |
| Late actionable intelligence | Provides early, real-time insights to avoid rework |
The Eureka–Iceberg Integration
Eureka seamlessly integrates with Caresoft’s Iceberg Benchmarking Platform. Iceberg delivers deep benchmarking data (Data-as-a-Service), while Eureka transforms that data into knowledge and action (Knowledge-as-a-Service). This combination ensures that teardown insights don’t remain as static reports but become real-world cost reduction opportunities ready for adoption.
Cultural Shift: From Cost Control to Cost Leadership
The introduction of Eureka also helps drive a deeper cultural change. Instead of cost reduction being a reactive, late-stage scramble, it becomes a proactive, continuous process embedded across the organization. OEMs using Eureka shift from asking “where can we cut?” to asking “how can we lead in cost efficiency?”
This mindset allows companies to balance innovation with discipline—investing boldly in future technologies while removing every ounce of waste that does not create customer value.
Efficiency remains destiny for automakers. Cost, mass, and time will always dictate whether companies can thrive amid disruption. What’s different now is how these imperatives are pursued. Digital tools like Eureka are enabling OEMs to act earlier, smarter, and more systematically than ever before.
By combining global benchmarks, expert guidance, and a collaborative workspace, Eureka turns complexity into clarity. It empowers leadership, engineers, and experts alike to design vehicles that are not only innovative but also cost-optimized and competitive. The road ahead for the auto industry is uncertain, but one truth is clear: organizations that master efficiency will shape the next chapter. With platforms like Eureka, OEMs have a powerful ally to reduce material cost, shed weight, and shorten assembly time, unlocking savings worth hundreds of euros per vehicle and ensuring competitiveness in the electric era and beyond.
