Lawrence Delos Miles (April 21, 1904

Harvard, Nebraska Harvard is a city in Clay County, Nebraska, United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 1,013. It is part of the Hastings, Nebraska Micropolitan Statistical Area. History Harvard was founded in 1871 when the railroad was exten ...

– August 1, 1985) was an American engineer, and the creator of

Value engineering Value engineering (VE) is a systematic analysis of the functions of various components and materials to lower the cost of goods, products and services with a tolerable loss of performance or functionality. Value, as defined, ...

. His parents were Delos Daniel Miles, Superintendent of Harvard School, and Vinetta Conkle Miles, an elementary school teacher.

Life and Work

1932-1938: Worked as a design engineer at

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...

(GE) under W .C. White, Manager of the Vacuum Tube Engineering Dept. During this six year periods, he earned twelve

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A ...

s for his new designs of

vacuum tube A vacuum tube, electron tube, valve (British usage), or tube (North America), is a device that controls electric current flow in a high vacuum between electrodes to which an electric potential difference has been applied. The type known as ...

s and related circuits. 1938-1944: Transferred to GE's

Purchasing Purchasing is the process a business or organization uses to acquire goods or services to accomplish its goals. Although there are several organizations that attempt to set standards in the purchasing process, processes can vary greatly betwee ...

Department, working under Harry Erlicher, VP Purchasing. Worked with vendors to obtain lower costs, then with change of emphasis to procure adequate quantities for the

war effort In politics and military planning, a war effort is a coordinated mobilization of society's resources—both industrial and human—towards the support of a military force. Depending on the militarization of the culture, the relative si ...

. 1944-1947: Transferred to Locke Insulator,

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

, a subsidiary of GE, as manager of Purchasing. Saw first-hand both the productive and destructive force of human attitudes and practices, and their effect on appropriate designs and appropriate costs. Fall 1947: Returned to

Schenectady, New York Schenectady () is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2020 census, the city's population of 67,047 made it the state's ninth-largest city by population. The city is in eastern New Y ...

to Erlicher's staff and was placed under William Sredenscheck who gave him full support to produce an approach for GE to improve cost and productivity. In December 1947, the basic Value Analysis Functional Approach was established. 1961 - Miles wrote the definitive book, ''Techniques of Value Analysis and Engineering'', published by McGraw Hill and Co. It is now in its 3rd edition and is printed in twelve languages. He retired in 1964 and died in 1985. His wife, Eleanor R. Miles, survived him and continued to promote his work after his death. 2017 - Techniques of Value Analysis and Engineering has been released in a Kindle edition and is available on Amazon.com.

Laurence Delos Miles Value Foundation

The Miles Value Foundation was established in 1977 "to promote and fund the development of educational programs, new applications, and o establisha

research library A research library is a library which contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects.(Young, 1983; p. 188) A research library will generally include an in-depth selection of materials on a particular topic or set of to ...

for the study of the Value Methodology".Lawrence Delos Miles Value Foundation
Lawrence Delos Miles Value Foundation
accessed 16 March 2019

References

People from Schenectady, New York 1904 births 1985 deaths Engineers from New York (state) 20th-century American engineers {{US-engineer-stub