The future success of your value analysis program depends on FOCUS. When you focus on doing a few things exceptionally well, you create a powerful ability to have breakthrough performance from your value analysis teams. This can only be obtained by narrowing your focus to three things:

1: The Right People: Most value analysis team members are selected because of their positions in your organization (Finance Manager, Purchased Services Manager, Public Relations Director, etc.), as opposed to being selected for their ideal competencies that are required for a successful VA team. Winning VA teams are a combination of attitudes, talents, and traits matched with the right leadership to give your team the vision, goals, objectives, and can-do attitude; a team that takes responsibility for its actions and pride in its accomplishments.

2: The Right Things: Traditionally, value analysis teams only focus their energies on new products, services, and technologies, while at the same time, little or no emphasis is placed on value justifying the millions of dollars of existing products, services, and technologies that are purchased annually by their organization. THOUSANDS OF PRODUCTS, SERVICES, AND TECHNOLOGIES (and millions of dollars) NEVER SHOW UP ON ANYONE’S RADAR SCREEN.

A more strategic approach in your search for savings and quality gains is to continuously place every product, service, and technology you purchase annually over $25,000 (and their value chains) under a microscope. This would determine if these commodities are in conformance or in non-conformance related to the functional requirements of your internal and external customers.

3: The Right Process: Value analysis isn’t a committee of 20+ members reviewing and approving contracts, negotiating, bidding, or doing something else to reduce a supplier’s cost, approving new product, service, or technology requests, or any of these things that most organizations call VALUE ANALYSIS. Value analysis is a function-oriented, systematic team approach for providing, designing, or investigating the right functions (primary, secondary, and aesthetic) for the millions of dollars of products, services, and technologies that are required to operate your organization. The value analysis methodology can be applied to any product, process, procedure, system, or service in your organization. Its goal is to ascertain, through value analysis studies, the valued characteristics deemed most important by your customers (internal and external).

Now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked in the orchard, it’s more important than ever before for value analysis practitioners to narrow their focus to a few strategically selected areas of improving their VA performance.