CREATING VALUE WITHLEAN THINKING AND VALUE ENGINEERING1

摘要

Value Engineering can leverage, accelerate, and amplify efforts to implement Lean principles andpractices in your organization, and vice-versa. Moreover, if you’re already implementing Leanprinciples and practices, use of VE can significantly enhance your overall efforts to reduce cost andincrease value by using VE to not only leverage your Lean efforts, but also address areas not withinthe 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 andpractices that, in the right context, can transform an organization’s culture, productivity,profitability, and customer relations. Separately, in their respective spheres, VE and Lean areapproaches with much to offer. Taken together, they offer great synergy. There should be noconflict between the approaches, and there should be no need to compromise between the twoapproaches. With a good understanding of the respective strengths and weaknesses of bothdisciplines, managers and analysts should be able to construct an environment where the twoapproaches collaborate – where they are more than the sum of their separate parts. Organizationscapable of this collaboration will benefit, and those organizations’ customers will benefit.