What you’ll learn
- Why teardown gives the most reliable evidence in Value Engineering, and what it costs and pays back
- The five steps in detail: recording, taking apart, listing the parts (BOM), should-costing and turning findings into ideas
- Six ways to benchmark, how AI is changing the teardown lab, and the ethical and legal limits
What you’ll produce
By the end of this module you’ll have a teardown parts list and a benchmark against a rival. Free templates:
From the module
Why teardown matters
Phase 2 taught you to ask "what is this function worth?" The honest answer is hard to find from inside your own company. Your cost systems tell you what things do cost, not what they could cost. Your engineers defend designs they created. Your suppliers quote as much as the market will pay. The one piece of evidence nobody can argue with is a competitor's product doing the same job for less, sitting on your bench, taken apart, weighed and costed. That's what teardown gives you: not opinion, but physical proof of what's possible.
Any product on sale can be bought and studied, and a whole industry exists to do exactly that. Your competitors are almost certainly studying your products this way. The only question is whether you study theirs.
Short narrated video in this module
Continue reading in Module 10, or read the related guide: Teardown & Benchmarking.