Mr. Rains has over 30 years of value engineering (VE) experience. During this time he has facilitated over 750 teams in VE, lean manufacturing, lean engineering, and competitive teardown workshops. For the past 15 years he has studied target costing from Japanese experts and believes this vital management philosophy leads to constant and consistent levels of corporate profitability. Mr. Rains is a certified value specialist (CVS) and has led numerous international corporations, architectural/engineering firms, and U.S. government DOD installations to successful results. VE studies have included product design, process improvement, procedures, weight reduction, quality improvement, organization effectiveness improvement, product development, process lead time, productivity, and throughput improvements. He has worked in many types of industries, including oil and gas companies, and with A/E firms to improve building designs and associated expenses. His VE and lean efforts have been exposed to a global network, including workshops in Austria, Australia, China, England, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea, Kuwait, Mexico, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, and the United States.
Techniques and tools used in his workshops include the value engineering job plan, quality function deployment, voice of the customer, design for manufacturability/design for assembly (DFM/DFA), function analysis, creativity techniques, paired comparison, idea selection matrix, synchronous thinking, elimination of waste, and team building. Many of these workshops are SAVE International Certified Module I Workshops that just in the past four years have led to over 300 people becoming associate value specialists (AVSs) certified in value engineering. During this time he has been an advisor to three certified value specialists (CVSs). Since 1999 Jim has written and presented 13 papers that relate to VE at conferences around the globe. Jim's lean
