Value engineering is a method in product industrial engineering. Product industrial engineering is redesign of product to decrease cost for the same quality and reliability. It identifies the deficiencies in design that are increasing the cost and creates new design solutions.
Information, Knowledge and Creative Effort Drive Industrial Engineering, Value Engineering, Productivity Improvement and Rational Cost Reduction.
"(There is) practically limitless stores of industrial technical information and skill for use in providing better value, i.e., lower costs, for appropriate products and services." - L.D. Miles.
"Somewhere in the market, information exists which will aid in reliably accomplishing the function at lowest cost." - L.D. Miles
The procedure outlined by L.D. Miles for value engineering has application in process industrial engineering. Miles borrowed heavily from industrial engineering and cost reduction methodologies to develop, value analysis and value engineering which has as its main purpose identifying and removing unnecessary costs. Its basic approach is different as it focuses on the function to be accomplished by a part or a product or even an operation or a process. Value engineering became a popular method for analyzing and reengineering the products and components or parts.
Miles stated that there has to be a planned process for cost reduction and every step has to be done irrespective of the difficulty involved to derive right results.
The steps he gave in a nutshell are:
1. Take up the product or part and determine the functions to be accomplished.
2. Secure the needed information.
3. Do creative work. Use real creativity.
4. Analyze the output of the creative work (workshop) for selecting the best choices for further development.
5. Establish plan and program to develop the selected courses of action.
6. Pursue and develop the solutions with solving many minor problems of both engineering and managerial areas without faltering.
7. Present the recommended solution and benefits to the decision makers in the organization.
In this article our focus is on steps 2 and 3 related to information collection and creative work.
Miles gave the job plan for carrying out the above steps. The job plan is first briefly explained.
Job Plan for Value Engineering
Phase 1. Orientation: Understand the customers’ needs and wants. Understand the functions performed by the product and the contribution of each part and each feature of the part and the complete product to the functions to be performed by the product.
Value engineer has to make sure that he does not diminish the contribution of the product to the customers' needs and wants.
Phase 2. Information: Collection of information on quantities, vendors, drawings, materials, manufacturing methods, and costs.
Phase 3. Speculation: Using all the techniques of value analysis to come out with alternative low cost materials and methods to produce components and the product. Creativity is to be employed here. Value engineer has to involve experts from various disciplines to help with ideas.
Phase 4. Analysis: Technical and cost analysis of the alternative proposed.
Phase 5. Program planning: Approach the specialists to further refine the selected alternatives. Inform the specialists the accepted suggestions and give mandate to them to take steps to implement the suggestions.
Phase 6. Program execution: Pursue regularly the specialists and vendors to get their inputs on various tasks assigned to them. The output of this phase is a detailed design, successful trail pilot run of a manufacturing process or a confirmed estimate from a vendor for supplying a component, material or sub assembly.
Phase 7. Status summary and conclusion. The results of the value engineering study are to be presented to decision makers. The reports needs to have a summary sheet as well as the full supporting documentation. The value engineering project is concluded when the product is manufactured and distributed at the lowered cost as per the value engineering study.
Information Collection for Value Engineering - Industrial Engineering
The value engineer (industrial engineer) has to secure specifications, drawings, process planning cards, manufacturing methods data as well as actual samples of parts and assemblies where practicable. He has to collect information related to the quantities required, batch quantities and costs. He also has to collect information on the vendors currently supplying, vendors to who quotation requests are sent and vendors who are approaching them for orders etc.
In the case of proposed new products, design concepts, preliminary sketches or prototype sketches and preliminary cost estimates etc. are to be collected.
The engineering used in the product is understood through a discussion with the product design engineers based on the drawings collected by asking questions to develop a thorough understanding of the experience today with the product design.
Similarly, the manufacturing process and operations employed are understood by discussion with he manufacturing experts within the company based on process plans collected by asking questions as well as direct study of the operations and process to develop a deep understanding.
Outside experts are contacted and literature is perused to identify a variety of alternative materials, machine processes and machine alternatives and design rules or designs of parts.
As a part of this step, the amount of time to be spent for value analysis is also determined based on the cost data collected.
Knowledge management is an important task for industrial engineers and value engineers. As presently, computer based knowledge management systems are available industrial engineers have to examine using them for their engineering purpose along with the engineering departments.
Related article: Knowledge Required for Value Engineering Application and Practice
Creative Work for Value Engineering - Industrial Engineering
Creative work is given the term speculation by L.D. Miles. Securing the available information and understanding it by various persons going to participate intensively in the value analysis effort leads to the next stage of creative or speculative work. In this stage the information and knowledge acquired are coupled with various questions that emerge from the 13 value analysis techniques and the general question, "what else would accomplish the function?" to generate every possible solution to remove the unnecessary cost. The overall problem, parts of the problem and within the part individual problems are attacked with knowledge and creative effort.
To benefit fully from the knowledge, creative energy, power and effort of people, value engineers have to:
- Arrange brainstorming sessions
- Encourage free use of imagination without putting any constraints.
- Record every suggestions without objection and argument.
- Systematically present a variety of materials, machine processes and design concepts so that their creative application to solve the problem at hand is attempted by the participants of the creative work shop.
Even person who did not participate in the workshop can be be consulted.
In the case of promising ideas, if some objections surface, another creative attempt can be made to remove the objections.
A Presentation on Miles Technique of Use Real Creativity
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Industrial engineering is productivity improvement and cost reduction by doing engineering changes and human motion changes based on observations and data on productivity and costs during operations and on the basis of developments in engineering and technology.
What is Industrial Engineering? What are its principles?
Industrial engineering is productivity improvement and cost reduction by doing engineering changes and human motion changes based on observations and data on productivity and costs during operations and on the basis of developments in engineering and technology.
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Ud 21.11.2021
Pub 4 May 2021
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