Why VA/VE Turns Into a Demand for a Discount: Rebuilding From the Definition of Cost

Hello, this is Ryuta Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

A meeting that opens with "let's do some VE" turns out, by the end, to have been about a discount. I have heard versions of this from manufacturers more times than I can count. You prepare material expecting a discussion about function, and what comes out is a single number: minus so many per cent year on year. Sit in enough of those rooms and you start to flinch at the word VE itself.

This is not a persecution complex on the shop floor. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry writes it up in its own guidelines as a problem case.

The significance of CR (cost review) and VA/VE and the like is understood, but in practice discount requests without reasonable grounds are made periodically

That appears in the guidelines for the casting, forging and related industries, among the examples of periodic price revisions lacking reasonable grounds. Immediately after it, the document states the legal basis: Article 5(1)(v) of the Act on Appropriate Subcontract Transactions, the prohibition on unfairly low pricing¹. The state, in other words, treats a discount demand wearing the VA/VE name as a matter touching on unfairly low pricing.

In this piece I re-check the definition of VE against primary sources, and then deal with the wall that sits in front of it: unless you know your own costs, neither VE nor a price negotiation works. The arithmetic of building up machining cost is in AI for cost estimation in manufacturing, so here I take on what comes before the arithmetic, the definition and the checking.

The rules are, if anything, on your side

Let me start with the encouraging part. The same guidelines do not reject cost reduction. They say this.

Cost reduction activity is something that the commissioning business and the small and medium-sized contracting business should work on together with the aim of securing continuous competitiveness, and when reflecting its results in the transaction price, prices must be set reasonably according to the degree of contribution, on the basis of the cost reduction effect derived from specific improvement activities such as productivity gains¹

According to the degree of contribution. That clause is the crux. If it was your company that made the improvement, the gain should stay with your company. And the guidelines offer this as a good practice.

By actively communicating self-help efforts such as VA/VE proposals, the company has avoided groundless demands for price reductions and built a Win-Win relationship¹

So a VA/VE proposal can serve as a shield against groundless demands for price cuts. The same document also carries a case where a supplier proposed improvement activity to the commissioning business, worked on it jointly, and agreed to share the resulting cost reduction appropriately between them¹.

There are more committed designs than that. The implementing rules for VE proposals at the Kinki Regional Development Bureau of Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism provide that where a post-contract VE proposal reduces the contract sum, five tenths of the expected reduction is not deducted, held instead as a VE management fee². Half of the saving stays with the party who proposed it, written into the contract. It is a public works framework, but it stands as proof that sharing the gain can be put in writing.

The catch is that holding this shield takes a precondition. To "actively communicate self-help efforts", you have to be able to say in your own words what you improved, by how much, and what it brought the cost down to. Which returns us to cost. If you are curious where your own company stands on AI, our AI readiness check is a quick way to find your footing before the practical half of this piece.

VE is not a discount. Let me pin the definition down

Because VE gets used as a synonym for a price cut, it is worth going back to the definition in primary sources.

The Society of Japanese Value Engineering defines VE as a method that grasps the value of a product or service through the relationship between the function it should perform and the cost devoted to that function, and raises value through a systematised procedure. It records that VE was developed in 1947 by L.D. Miles at GE in the United States and introduced to Japan around 1960, initially into the materials departments of manufacturers, where the scale of the cost reduction it produced drew attention³. That it entered through purchasing may be part of why VE is so easily confused with discounting.

The basic formula is value equals function divided by cost. A technical journal article writes it as V (value) = F (Function) / C (Cost: the lowest life-cycle cost). The denominator being the lowest life-cycle cost rather than simply cost is the part that matters⁴.

And the sentence I most wanted to put in this piece is in that same article. Having sorted improvements in value into four patterns, it states plainly:

It tends to be misunderstood that something whose function deteriorates slightly while its cost falls substantially also counts as an improvement in value, but that is a serious mistake⁴

Dropping function to make something cheaper is not VE, said by the specialists themselves. The article also sets out VE's five basic principles: user first, function-oriented, change through creation, team design, and improvement of value⁴.

The procedure is fixed too. Three basic steps (defining function, evaluating function, developing alternatives) and ten detailed steps, with a VE question attached to each: what is it, what does it do, what does it cost, what is its value, is there anything else that does the same job. The article adds that no step may be skipped⁴. A Society of Japanese Value Engineering document lays out the same sequence: defining function as gathering information on the VE subject, defining the function, and organising functions; evaluating function as analysing cost by function, evaluating the function, and selecting the target area; developing alternatives as generating ideas, rough evaluation, working them up, and detailed evaluation⁵.

Public procurement has the same reading. The draft design VE guidelines from the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management give value as function divided by cost, and define cost as not aiming only at reducing initial outlay such as construction cost but as including reduction of cost with the life cycle in view. And a section heading says it outright: reducing initial cost alone is not VE⁶. The guidelines note that VE and cost reduction are sometimes treated as the same thing, and describe VE as deliberately stepping away from the materials, equipment, construction methods and customary solutions currently in use, a "letting go of the thing" and "letting go of the method"⁶.

Letting go of the thing, letting go of the method. I like those phrases. The substance of VE is releasing the means you are using and thinking again from the function that has to be performed. A discount negotiation does not contain that step.

I went looking for where "80 per cent of cost is decided at design" comes from

One figure always appears in VE discussions: 80 per cent of cost is decided at the design stage. It gets used to put design departments on the back foot, so I checked where it comes from.

The trail I could follow ends at a 2016 paper in the Journal of Cost Accounting Research, which quotes a textbook to the effect that 70 to 80 per cent of cost is determined at the product planning and development stage. The citation is to a specific pair of pages in a book edited by Hiromoto, Kato and Okano; the paper presents the figure as a citation and does not show the empirical study behind the 70 to 80 per cent⁷. As far as I searched, I never reached that underlying data.

So I would stop using this figure as grounds for blaming a design department. Cornering people with a number whose primary source cannot be found is poor practice, even when the direction is right.

With that said, I do think the direction holds. The grounds are not the number but VE's own procedure. VE starts from defining function because once something is built, only the means can still be changed. Once the shape, the material and the tolerances are set, what remains is improvement in machining method, setup and yield. Real improvements, but the room to question the function itself has already closed. Without reaching for 80 per cent, the weight of the design stage can be explained by that sequence alone.

If the definition of cost is not aligned, neither negotiation nor checking works

Here is the substance. In front of VE sits a wall much closer to home.

The Small and Medium Enterprise Agency's price negotiation handbook says this officially.

Even where expenses and labour costs can be calculated for the company or for a business unit, cost accounting per product or per service is extremely complex, and many businesses do not have a grasp of it. And this is one of the factors that make price negotiation difficult.⁸

The same handbook carries this from the field: there is machining work we have taken on for nearly twenty years without changing the unit price; we have never carried out cost accounting by part or by type of machining⁸. The sector tag on it reads "parts machining". That voice sits in a government document as it is.

Now the figures. According to the Small and Medium Enterprise Agency's follow-up survey for the price negotiation promotion month, the cost pass-through rate as of March 2026 was 54.2 per cent. That comes from 69,625 responding companies out of 300,000 approached, covering the period from October 2025 to the end of March 2026⁹. By cost item: raw materials 55.7 per cent, labour 50.0 per cent, energy 48.9 per cent. The original text reads that while the pass-through rate for raw materials rose, labour and energy costs were flat against the previous round¹⁰. The share of companies that passed through none at all was 16.6 per cent for raw materials, 20.6 per cent for labour and 22.4 per cent for energy¹⁰.

What I want to draw attention to is that the opportunity to negotiate has grown. In the same survey, the share where a price negotiation took place reached 90.7 per cent¹⁰. Nine in ten are at the table, and still only half gets through. The bottleneck is no longer the absence of a chance to talk. It has moved to what gets said.

In the Japan Fair Trade Commission's special survey, buyers gave this as a reason.

Because we think that a supplier's quotation, without any need for consultation, naturally includes the cost increase, we do not hold consultations unless the supplier raises the matter of a price increase¹¹

That one lands. If you leave the cost table alone and quote at last year's rates, the other side reads it as "they are making an acceptable margin at today's costs". A quotation is received as a statement of intent whether or not you meant it as one.

So should you simply open your cost structure and negotiate? This needs care. The labour cost pass-through guideline from the Cabinet Secretariat and the Japan Fair Trade Commission points suppliers towards published material as evidence, such as increases in the minimum wage and settlements from the spring wage round. And then it cautions:

This is not to deny that a supplier may, at its own discretion, show the buyer the state of its labour costs; however, disclosing its cost structure including labour costs to the buyer may instead result in the buyer assessing those costs and demanding cost reductions¹²

Cost figures are not something you hold in order to show them. You hold them so that you can judge. Whether to disclose is a separate decision, and the guideline keeps the two apart. Awareness of the guideline itself, incidentally, rose from 48.8 per cent in the FY2024 survey to 59.6 per cent in FY2025, up 10.8 points¹¹. Four in ten still do not know it.

First, align what "cost" means

So where do you start? My answer is with aligning what the word "cost" refers to inside your own company.

The anchor is the Cost Accounting Standards, set by the Business Accounting Deliberation Council on 8 November 1962 and positioned as part of the corporate accounting principles, dealing specifically with cost¹³. A document more than sixty years old, but still usable as the skeleton of a definition. The classification by form runs like this: material cost is "cost arising from the consumption of goods", labour cost is "cost arising from the consumption of labour services", and expenses are "cost elements other than material cost and labour cost"¹³.

The classification by relation to the product is worth holding onto as well. Direct and indirect cost are separated by "a distinction in nature as to whether the occurrence of the cost is recognised directly in relation to the creation of a given unit of product", and each divides into direct material, direct labour and direct expenses, or indirect material, indirect labour and indirect expenses¹³. In relation to operating volume, fixed cost is a "cost element that does not change regardless of increases or decreases in operating volume", and variable cost is one that "increases or decreases proportionally with operating volume". What fits neither is called semi-fixed cost (supervisors' salaries, for example) or semi-variable cost (electricity charges)¹³.

This classification matters because it is where the conditions for VE's function-based cost analysis sit. To allocate cost by function, you first need it settled what is direct and what is indirect. On the shop floor, though, one person uses "cost" to mean material cost only while another means total cost with overhead loaded on. Build a function evaluation table in that state and the numbers do not meet. Where VE fails to take, my sense is that it is usually not ignorance of the method but a definition that was never aligned.

Aligning it is not hard. For each item, write on a single sheet which cost elements are included and how far. That is all. It just never starts unless somebody is told to do it.

There is a shape to the checking, every time

Once the definition is aligned, next comes checking every quotation you issue. This part can be a procedure rather than experience. Five things have worked, in what I have seen.

The first is applying an index per item to material cost. A common failure is multiplying everything by the headline rate of increase to re-cut the cost table. Look at the Bank of Japan's producer price index by item (June 2026 preliminary, 2020 average = 100) and the materials move quite differently from one another.

Item	Index	Year on year
Non-ferrous metals	252.4	＋39.2%
Scrap	218.0	＋34.1%
Petroleum and coal products	186.5	＋22.8%
Iron and steel	143.9	▲0.4%
Electric power, gas and water	141.6	＋3.4%
Metal products	136.1	＋1.0%
Chemicals	130.0	＋14.4%
Plastic products	126.0	＋7.3%

Non-ferrous metals are up 39.2 per cent year on year while iron and steel is down 0.4. The all-commodity domestic producer price index stood at 135.4, up 7.1 per cent¹⁴. Multiply everything by the headline figure and you overstate steel-heavy items and understate non-ferrous-heavy ones. Applying a different index to each item is a small extra step that turns directly into accuracy.

The second is separating the exchange rate from the material price. In the import price index, metals and metal products were up 40.7 per cent year on year in yen terms but 27.1 per cent in contract currency terms¹⁴. The gap is the currency effect. Mix the two on items you buy from abroad and you can no longer tell whether the material went up or the yen went down. When you cannot explain yourself at the negotiating table, this is usually the split that was never made.

The third is holding labour cost in a form you can explain from published material. As noted above, the labour cost guideline points to published sources such as increases in the minimum wage and settlements from the spring wage round¹². In the Monthly Labour Survey (final figures for May 2026), total cash earnings across all surveyed industries at establishments with five or more employees were 311,448 yen, up 3.3 per cent year on year¹⁵. Before you open your own payroll ledger, fix the range you can explain from published sources. That order is the safer one.

The fourth is watching the gap between the quotation date and the order date. With material prices moving like this, the cost on the day you issued the quotation and the cost on the day you actually buy the material are different things. Put a validity period on it, or write in a materials escalation clause. Do neither and you have decided, by default, that your company absorbs the movement.

The fifth is setting the cycle for updates. Unit price tables and charge rates both go stale if nobody refreshes them. Remember the buyers in the Japan Fair Trade Commission survey who said they assumed a quotation naturally included the cost increase¹¹. A quotation issued from an old unit price table is read as a statement that today's costs are covered, whatever you intended. For building up machining cost itself and for setting charge rates, see AI for cost estimation in manufacturing.

Reassembling those five by hand every time is not realistic. An index per item, past quotations against actual costs, and what a similarly shaped part was accepted for. With those three connected, the check takes minutes. Without them, you fall back on what a veteran remembers. On quotations that live in one person's head, see breaking the dependence on individuals in quoting; on getting past drawings to a state where they can be found, AI for drawing and similar-drawing search; on raising a quotation from a drawing, how to automate quoting from drawings. On what you lose when a veteran retires, AI for passing on skills in manufacturing.

ZEROCK, the service we offer, is designed to take on the connecting part. Past drawings, quotations and cost records, held internally with their relationships structured. Stored encrypted on domestic AWS servers, and customer drawings are never used to retrain the AI. Let me be honest about the order, though. Connect the data while the definition of cost is still unaligned and all you get is a row of numbers nobody can read. Definition first, machinery second. On adding rather than discarding equipment, I wrote about that in AI-driven transformation for parts manufacturers.

To sum up

The points, gathered up.

• METI's guidelines for the casting, forging and related industries (last revised November 2025) list, as a problem case, a situation where the significance of VA/VE is understood while discount requests without reasonable grounds are made periodically, and tie it to the prohibition on unfairly low pricing. A discount demand wearing the VA/VE name is not VAVE
• The same guidelines carry a good practice in which communicating VA/VE self-help efforts served as a shield against groundless price reduction demands. The rules are on your side, but holding that shield requires knowing your own costs
• VE's basic formula is value equals function divided by cost, and the denominator is the lowest life-cycle cost. A technical journal states plainly that a slight loss of function with a large drop in cost is not an improvement in value
• On "80 per cent of cost is decided at design", the trail I could follow ends at a paper citing a textbook; I could not confirm the primary empirical data. You do not need this figure to blame anyone. Explaining why VE starts from defining function is enough
• The cost pass-through rate was 54.2 per cent as of March 2026, while price negotiations took place in 90.7 per cent of cases. The chance to talk has reached nine in ten and only half gets through, so the bottleneck has moved from opportunity to evidence
• The Small and Medium Enterprise Agency's handbook states officially that many businesses do not have a grasp of cost accounting per product, and that this is one of the factors making price negotiation difficult
• Start by aligning the definition of cost internally, using the classification by form and the direct-indirect split in the Cost Accounting Standards. Then apply an index per item to material cost. A single headline multiplier will be wrong

One closing thought. Writing this, what kept striking me is that the method itself is well made, and yet the side that uses it and the side it is used on have become fixed. Look at the cumulative pass list for the VE Leader certification and the top thirty organisations are large electrical, heavy industry and construction firms¹⁶. The people who can run VE are concentrated on the side that asks for VE proposals, not the side asked for them.

If that is the picture, the surest preparation available to the side being asked is to get to where you can explain your own costs in your own words. Not to disclose them, but so that the next time someone says "VE, so many per cent", you can pull the conversation back to function. If you would like to work through a design that connects cost and drawings and keeps them inside your own company, please talk to the ZEROCK team. Before that, count how many lines on your own quotation form have not been updated since last year. That is the first piece of homework.

References and primary sources

Footnotes

1. Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, guidelines for promoting appropriate contracting transactions in the casting, forging and related materials industries, issued June 2007, last revised November 2025. Among the "examples of periodic price revisions lacking reasonable grounds" it lists "the significance of CR (Cost Review) and VA/VE and the like is understood, but in practice discount requests without reasonable grounds are made periodically", followed by "legal basis: Article 5(1)(v) of the Act on Appropriate Subcontract Transactions (prohibition on unfairly low pricing)". The passage on sharing the results of cost reduction activity according to the degree of contribution, and the good practice on VA/VE proposals averting groundless price reduction demands, are from the same guidelines. https://www.sokeizai.or.jp/files/libs/3112/202603301040387533.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Kinki Regional Development Bureau, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, implementing rules for VE proposals. Defines a post-contract VE proposal as a proposal by the contractor to the client for changes to the design documents concerning construction materials, construction methods and the like that enable a reduction in the contract sum without lowering the function or performance of the works, and provides that where adopted, "five tenths of the amount by which the contract sum is expected to be reduced (hereinafter the 'VE management fee') shall not be deducted". The document itself carries no printed issue date and is published on the bureau's site. https://www.kkr.mlit.go.jp/plan/jigyousya/technical_information/gijutsukanri/qgl8vl0000004zj9-att/VEteian.pdf ↩

3. Society of Japanese Value Engineering, "What is VE". Sets out the definition of VE, that it was developed in 1947 by L.D. Miles at GE in the United States and introduced to Japan around 1960, and that it entered initially through the materials departments of manufacturers. https://www.sjve.org/vecan/ve ↩

4. The Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, Vol. 131 No. 6 (2011) pp. 367-370, "Value Engineering: VE — a method for raising and creating value with a focus on function". Carries the definition, the basic formula V (value) = F (Function) / C (Cost: the lowest life-cycle cost), the five basic principles (user first, function-oriented, change through creation, team design, improvement of value), the four patterns of value improvement, the statement that treating a slight deterioration in function with a large fall in cost as an improvement in value is a serious mistake, and the procedure (three basic steps and ten detailed steps with their VE questions, together with the note that no step may be skipped). https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ieejjournal/131/6/131_6_367/_pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Society of Japanese Value Engineering, West Japan Branch VE Tools Study Group, "VE special material", March 2026. Figure 1-2 sets out the Japanese VE procedure as VE planning, then defining function (gathering information on the VE subject, defining the function, organising functions), evaluating function (cost analysis by function, evaluating the function, selecting the target area), developing alternatives (generating ideas, rough evaluation, working up, detailed evaluation), then the VE proposal and follow-up. https://www.sjve.org/_wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/ad65203c4841f9268b3cb94050b343f3.pdf ↩

6. National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management, Construction Management Division, Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, "Design VE guidelines (draft)", October 2004. Gives value as function divided by cost and defines cost as including reduction with the life cycle in view rather than initial outlay alone. Contains the section heading "reducing initial cost alone is not VE", the observation that VE and cost reduction are sometimes treated as the same thing, and the phrases "letting go of the thing" and "letting go of the method". https://www.nilim.go.jp/lab/peg/img/file224.pdf ↩ ↩²

7. Journal of Cost Accounting Research Vol. 40 No. 2 (2016), Yohei Seki, "Conditions for the establishment of target costing". The text quotes a textbook (Hiromoto, Kato and Okano, eds., 2012, pp. 117-118) to the effect that 70 to 80 per cent of cost is determined at the product planning and development stage. The paper presents this as a citation and does not show the empirical study behind the 70 to 80 per cent. https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jcar/40/2/40_112/_pdf ↩

8. Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, "Price negotiation handbook for small and medium-sized enterprises and small businesses (revised edition)", first edition March 2022, last revised January 2026. Check 3, "Can you do cost accounting?", states that even where expenses and labour costs can be calculated for the company or a business unit, cost accounting per product or per service is extremely complex and many businesses do not have a grasp of it, and that this is one of the factors making price negotiation difficult. The same page carries, tagged "parts machining", the voice: there is machining work we have taken on for nearly twenty years without changing the unit price; we have never carried out cost accounting by part or by type of machining. https://www.chusho.meti.go.jp/keiei/torihiki/pamflet/kakaku_kosho_handbook.pdf ↩ ↩²

9. Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, results of the follow-up survey for the price negotiation promotion month (March 2026), published 26 June 2026. Cost pass-through rate 54.2 per cent (up about one point on the previous round), 300,000 companies approached, 69,625 responses, survey conducted 20 April to 3 June 2026, covering October 2025 to the end of March 2026. https://www.meti.go.jp/press/2026/06/20260626003/20260626003.html ↩

10. The same survey results PDF (Small and Medium Enterprise Agency, 26 June 2026). Pass-through rates by item: raw materials 55.7 per cent, labour 50.0 per cent, energy 48.9 per cent, with the original text reading that while the raw material rate rose, labour and energy were flat against the previous round. Shares passing through none at all: raw materials 16.6 per cent, labour 20.6 per cent, energy 22.4 per cent (distributions excluding responses of "no pass-through required"). The share where a price negotiation took place was 90.7 per cent (previous round 89.4 per cent). By transaction tier the rates were 55.2 per cent at first tier, 54.2 per cent at second, 50.2 per cent at third and 45.5 per cent at fourth tier or below; the original notes that the tendency for the rate to fall with depth continues while also stating that the gap between first tier and fourth tier or below narrowed. https://www.chusho.meti.go.jp/keiei/torihiki/follow-up/dl/202603/result_01.pdf ↩ ↩² ↩³

11. Japan Fair Trade Commission, results of the FY2025 special survey on fair trading for small and medium-sized businesses, published 15 December 2025. Records the buyer's view that "because we think that a supplier's quotation, without any need for consultation, naturally includes the cost increase, we do not hold consultations unless the supplier raises the matter of a price increase". Awareness of the labour cost pass-through guideline rose from 48.8 per cent in the FY2024 survey to 59.6 per cent in FY2025, up 10.8 points. The survey covers June 2024 to May 2025. https://www.jftc.go.jp/houdou/pressrelease/2025/dec/251215_tokubetsuchousa.kekka.honbun.html ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Cabinet Secretariat and Japan Fair Trade Commission, "Guideline on price negotiations for the appropriate pass-through of labour costs", issued 29 November 2023, amended 1 January 2026. Under actions for suppliers, item (ii), it states that published material such as increases in the minimum wage and settlements from the spring wage round should be used as evidence of the trend in labour costs, and that while a supplier may at its own discretion show the buyer the state of its labour costs, disclosing its cost structure including labour costs may instead result in the buyer assessing those costs and demanding cost reductions. https://www.jftc.go.jp/roumuhi_tenkasisin.pdf ↩ ↩²

13. Business Accounting Deliberation Council, "Cost Accounting Standards", 8 November 1962. Positioned as part of the corporate accounting principles, dealing specifically with cost. Section 8, criteria for classifying manufacturing cost elements, defines material cost as "cost arising from the consumption of goods", labour cost as "cost arising from the consumption of labour services", and expenses as "cost elements other than material cost and labour cost". The classification by relation to the product, and the classification by relation to operating volume (fixed, variable, semi-fixed and semi-variable cost), are from the same standards. https://www.asb-j.jp/jp/accounting_standards_system/details.html?topics_id=156 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

14. Bank of Japan, "Producer Price Index (June 2026 preliminary)", published 10 July 2026. The all-commodity domestic producer price index stood at 135.4 (2020 average = 100), up 0.4 per cent on the month and 7.1 per cent on the year. By group: non-ferrous metals 252.4 / ＋39.2%, scrap 218.0 / ＋34.1%, petroleum and coal products 186.5 / ＋22.8%, iron and steel 143.9 / ▲0.4%, electric power, gas and water 141.6 / ＋3.4%, metal products 136.1 / ＋1.0%, chemicals 130.0 / ＋14.4%, plastic products 126.0 / ＋7.3%. In the import price index, metals and metal products stood at 241.0 in yen terms, up 40.7 per cent on the year, against 27.1 per cent in contract currency terms. https://www.boj.or.jp/statistics/pi/cgpi_release/cgpi2606.pdf ↩ ↩²

15. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, "Monthly Labour Survey, final figures for May 2026", published 24 July 2026. Total cash earnings across all surveyed industries at establishments with five or more employees were 311,448 yen, up 3.3 per cent year on year. https://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/itiran/roudou/monthly/r08/2605r/dl/pdf2605r.pdf ↩

16. Society of Japanese Value Engineering, "FY2026 VE Leader certification examination brochure", March 2026. The list of the top thirty organisations by cumulative VE Leader passes (rounds 1 to 59) is headed by Mitsubishi Electric with 5,715, Fujita with 2,678, IHI with 2,598, Hitachi with 2,526 and Hitachi Construction Machinery with 2,301, and the top thirty are dominated by large electrical, heavy industry and construction firms. https://www.sjve.org/_wp/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/389e2b11f860ba50294fe9fe0b6a1406.pdf ↩