Design of modern mechanical products has a long tradition of including electronics and control in a heuristic way, although it is widely known that better solutions can be achieved if the mechanical design takes in account the possibilities and requirements of control from the very beginning. This unsatisfying practice has several reasons, an important one being the lack of tools to assess quantitatively the control suitability of a mechanical design. In this paper we propose, on the basis of actual project experience, a formulation of control suitability of the mechanical design which allows to decouple the controller and the mechanical design steps and thus to derive quantitative measures, computable through predefined simulation studies. The procedure is illustrated with a hydraulic system.