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Genesis, Goals, and Denitions
Value Analysis/Value Engineering (VA/VE) was born in 1947 at the General
Electric Company in Schenectady, New York. Harry Erlicher, vice president
of purchasing for GE, noticed at one point during World War II that when
GE faced a scarcity of strategic materials, (a) a great many substitutions of
materials had to be made due to the shortages and (b) many of the substitute
materials resulted in not only lower cost, but also in an improved product.
As Mr. Erlicher himself put it, “is happened so oen by accident, we
decided to try to make it happen on purpose.” To this task he assigned Larry
D. Miles, who through ...