New design methods and tools often promise large benefits for specific engineering tasks or whole engineering processes to make increasingly complex and sophisticated products possible. However, estimations for the pay-off of new methods or tools are based on gut feelings or rare expert knowledge. In this paper we present our approach for well-founded quantitative estimations for the economic impact of new methods or tools. We show the beginning of our methodology with an early experiment and the impact analysis for a case study of a design flow for electronic circuits.