In today's challenging environment, each company is looking for opportunities to increase value in all activities and products with minimum or no increase in resources and/or capital investment. In the current economy, our company's focus is to provide products with best value and quality while sustaining cost leadership in the global market. To achieve product cost leadership, it is becoming much more important to involve suppliers early in the product development process for new products. With everyone holding their hand out today for more cost savings, is it the last supplier in the material food chain that usually gets squeezed. The procurement community holds suppliers responsible to come up with more cost savings year over year on the same group of parts or components without any design or process changes. Is this possible, when at the same time, most manufacturing companies require suppliers to strictly adhere to the drawings and specifications as released with any change documented including source changes for raw materials? The purpose of this paper is to show how to involve suppliers in value engineering workshops to achieve product cost leadership. If each supplier throughout the manufacturing supply chain understands how the value methodology can help them to become a world-class supplier where real benefit is achieved at all levels, then everyone can truly become more competitive and a product cost leader. Most of the time suppliers may not be aware of the functions they deliver at a product level as he is only held responsible to meet part/component level specifications. If the suppliers are part of the final product Value Engineering Workshop, then they can bring their technical expertise and then the total product manufacturer's engineering team can potentially optimize the design or process without affecting end final customer functionality thereby acheiving product cost leadership. This paper will include some examples of successful integration of suppliers in final product Value Engineering Workshops.
展开▼
