Home > Practice Areas > Value Engineering / Value Analysis

VALUE ENGINEERING / VALUE ANALYSIS

To stay competitive, you have to focus on costs. Value Engineering is a proven way to significantly reduce costs – particularly the material costs that are often embedded in the product design.

At TCA, we’ve developed a function-oriented, systematic, facilitated team approach to Value Engineering. The result is improved value in your product, process, system, service or organization – and the results often provide payback of more than 10:1.

For over 23 years, we have worked with organizations to enhance performance and accelerate growth. Our Value Engineering Services are just one more way we’re helping to build and strengthen some of America’s best companies.

Companies from a wide cross-section of industries have used Value Engineering to reduce costs for many applications, including:

• • Existing product designs
  • New product development
  • Process improvement
  • Project cost control
  • Administrative organization
  • Information systems

What is Value Engineering?

Value Engineering is all about reducing costs, improving design and enhancing quality. The bulk of the cost of a manufactured product is not in labor or overhead – it’s in the material. And because design features drive material costs, a comprehensive cost reduction effort must attack the material cost embedded in the product design. This is the domain of Value Engineering.

Material: The bulk of manufactured product cost

Lean and Six Sigma address labor and variable overhead – but they have little or no impact on the single largest cost – material!

However, most companies simply do not have in-house Value Engineering capabilities. And unlike other continuous improvement tools, Value Engineering is simply too difficult for non-specialists to learn and apply.

TCA can help

TCA’s Certified Value Specialists have years of experience in the Value Engineering process. A highly technical team, they have the skills and expertise you need to match functions with customer requirements, reduce costs, increase profits, improve design, enhance quality and expand market share. Together, we’ll give your company a competitive advantage.

A proven approach delivers results

At TCA, we use three toolkits when implementing the Value Engineering process to identify and target areas to reduce costs.

The 6 Step Value Engineering Job Plan

This methodology, established by the Society of American Value Engineers, is applied systematically by our Certified Value Specialists to every project – ensuring that fact finding and creative efforts result in dramatic cost reductions. We identify all major
cost reduction opportunities, which can then be aggressively implemented.

Function Analysis Systems Technique (FAST) Model

Using the FAST model, we identify the functions performed by various components in a product or system, calculate the cost of performing each function and seek lower cost alternatives. Experienced TCA engineers work collaboratively with your team to perform a comprehensive FAST analysis and generate a wide range of cost reduction ideas.

Function/Cost Diagrams

A Function/Cost Diagram identifies major cost reduction opportunities. By displaying this diagram in a Pareto format, it is easy to see where the remaining effort must be focused.
We use these tools to maximize the number of usable approaches to performing key functions at greatly reduced costs. We test the technical and economic feasibility of the team’s ideas through detailed design and prototyping, “selling” the best ideas and managing a full range of implementation activities.

VALUE ENGINEERING IS A CRITICAL TOOL FOR REDUCING YOUR MOST SIGNIFICANT COSTS WHILE IMPROVING DESIGN AND ENHANCING QUALITY

TCA EXTREME LEAN™ EXPERTS

TCA has provided management consulting, technical assistance and training programs to business and industry for more than two decades. Our specialty is helping companies set new directions centered in World Class/Lean technologies.

Our clients are developing Extreme Lean™ capabilities to increase profits, grow market share, and solidify long-term relationships with key customers.

Whatever the combination of Lean, Six Sigma, Value Engineering or Automation tools your company needs, our associates are skilled in facilitating interdisciplinary teams to achieve creative, cost-effective solutions to many of the difficult challenges managers face in today’s hyper-competitive business climate.