Modern embedded systems are very complex to be designed given the considerable number of variables involved. For this reason, this work describes the application of an existing system-level HW/SW co-design methodology to analyze a part of an existing industrial embedded system in order to provide suggestions for alternative implementations without the need of finalize them, i.e., saving design time. For this, since the existing system is based on a C++ object-oriented implementation, the work also proposes an approach to transform it into a system-level model based on a communicating sequential processes model of computation written in SystemC, i.e., the one used by the adopted HW/SW co-design methodology. Then, the work describes how it is possible to perform a validation of performance estimation with respect to the real system and, subsequently, a fast comparison with respect to other implementation alternatives.