Excellent examples, and a great idea worthy of being pushed further. And no, it does not have be “depressingly” focused only on cost reduction as one reader has suggested. In fact, years ago, I came across a book on the Japanese approach to value engineering, or VE, that sought to provide the consumer or customer with the greatest bang for the VE buck. Starting with the most critical product dimensions (e.g., energy efficiency in the case of the fork lift), the book described how VE teams in Japanese firms—given a target price and hence a ceiling on product costs, including material costs, processing costs, etc.—would use an iterative “tear down” and “rebuild” approach to add more value to the product, till the cost and price targets were attainable. If, as was often the case, several teams were engaged in such exercises simultaneously, they would have to dynamically reconcile and adjust their individually arrived at solutions so that the overall cost/value/price targets could be met while ensuring that the product launch deadlines were not missed.

At Colour Revolution Inc. we invented and have patent applications on the only reusable self mixing applicator for hair colour. The Mixer Complete (P.C.A.) which will work for root touch ups or overall hair colour application changes the billion dollar home and salon hair colour market into a substantially more environmentaly friendly industry, both through much less product packaging and less chemical waste. Our discussions with the largest US company in the industry have been put on hold because this financial climate is all about immediate ROI. We’ve TORN DOWN the packaged hair color business in all the very best ways, in terms of cost and environment for both business and consumer.

Can product tear downs be related to service related jobs? For example, the tearing down of certain financial or fiduciary functions or teardown as it relates to real estate services?

Very useful to consider as a tool in business process evaluation with the objective of lightening the procedural load on departments across an organization. Like a spring cleaning, outcomes of the exercise are efficiencies, enhanced communications (internal and to the outside), and clarity.

Teardown was very popular in low-cost and mass production products like white goods and automobiles. But nowadays even industrial and construction equipment companies find that this adds value to the money spent on big and costly equipment. Even work on the teardown of equipment is offloaded to service industries in low-cost countries to cut costs.

In the UK manufacturing sector functional departments tend to use value-engineering and reverse-engineering techniques to achieve cost cutting and margin improvements. The use of cross functional teams to breakdown the silos is an excellent idea that is alas less widely deployed. A mid-sized printing machinery manufacturer in the UK that piloted the cross functional approach succeeded in evolving the best ideas into a whole new low cost product line.

Squeezing is the keyword in this article, it is depressingly focused almost solely on cost reduction; while in the forklift example this is laudable and appropriate, in the medical device and the FMCG examples, this approach is follow the leader and will create cheaper but lower quality and less differentiated products in terms of branding.

Where are the examples where the teardown actually leads to something new, that actually inspires, creates new value, or a better user experience? Rather, this tends to engender a mentality of race-to-the-bottom ‘value engineering’ in the team and company culture that uses this approach.

This article doesn’t say anything as how to do a product teardown. There are plenty of techniques for someone to actually DO this. Function Attribute Analysis, Trimming, and Su-Field analysis are powerful techniques from the TRIZ framework that effectively implement this concept.

The process and interactive marketing elements of a service can benefit from tear-down just as much as a tangible product.

The genesis of this teardown term is value analysis, a very disciplined technique developed by GE in the 1960s. Mainly used for cost reduction, it was a successful system that saved thousands of dollars. But it is detailed hard work and engineers hated it. Deja vu? Thanks for sharing an idea that's about 50 years old.

How do these studies account for the intellectual-property issues that arise when leveraging the design and functionality of a competitor’s product?

A product team wants to minimize the cost of “work-around” designs that avoid the competitor’s patents. A product team also wants to minimize the risk of discovering competitor patents that are relevant to the team’s current products.