1947年美国的一位设计工程师麦尔斯在《价值分析程序》一文中,说出了一句很平淡但却很透彻的话:“人们需要的不是产品本身,而是产品的功能”。此言一出,读者顿悟,这后来成为经济学中的一句名言。在实际生活中确实举不出任何一件是人们所需要的但又没有适当功能的产品或服务项目。麦尔斯的这句话不仅道出了一个客观真理,而且也成为价值工程学的重要指导思想。 In 1947, a design engineer in the United States, Miles, wrote a very plain but thorough statement in the article “Value Analysis Procedures”: “What people need is not the product itself, but the function of the product.” As soon as this statement was made, readers came to realize that this later became a famous saying in economics. In real life, there is indeed no product or service item that people need but do not have proper functions. This sentence of Miles not only shows an objective truth, but also becomes an important guiding ideology for value engineering.