CREATING VALUE WITH LEAN THINKING AND VALUE ENGINEERING1

摘要

Value Engineering can leverage, accelerate, and amplify efforts to implement Lean principles and practices in your organization, and vice-versa. Moreover, if you’re already implementing Lean principles and practices, use of VE can significantly enhance your overall efforts to reduce cost and increase value by using VE to not only leverage your Lean efforts, but also address areas not within the normal methodological purview of Lean. VE is a vigorous and effective analytic methodology. Analysts have applied VE in a great variety of situations – VE is flexible. Lean, on the other hand, while not specifically an analytic approach, brings to bear a group of operating principles and practices that, in the right context, can transform an organization’s culture, productivity, profitability, and customer relations. Separately, in their respective spheres, VE and Lean are approaches with much to offer. Taken together, they offer great synergy. There should be no conflict between the approaches, and there should be no need to compromise between the two approaches. With a good understanding of the respective strengths and weaknesses of both disciplines, managers and analysts should be able to construct an environment where the two approaches collaborate – where they are more than the sum of their separate parts. Organizations capable of this collaboration will benefit, and those organizations’ customers will benefit.