This is true for almost all manufactured products:
At AVG we encourage change based on two approaches according to the Japanese Target Costing model:
Kaizen is well known in most organizations. The culture of Kaizen covers the best practices that achieve, mainly, STABLE AND STANDARDIZED PROCESSES, with the least amount of resources. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Just in Time (JIT), Statistical Process Control(SPC), 6 Sigma; all have in common the achievement of stable and predictable processes.
Production is a network of operations and processes. Kaizen focuses on improving connections among those processes and improve operations' stability.
If your goal is to reduce operation costs, or improving quality and process control, then focusing on processes and operations will help your organization to boost productivity trough Kaizen.
Western Industry has only moderately applied the principles of Kaikaku. Kaikaku can be translated as "radical change"; or to be more specific, "changes with radical impacts in short periods of time". In a language comparable to kaizen, in AVG we call it "Discontinuous Improvement".
After more than 900 projects of experience, we are certain that Value Engineering and Tear-Down Analysis are the best practices to achieve these radical changes in a short time; and therefore became our core methods to perform Kaikaku.
If your goal is to reduce the cost of your product (without sacrificing quality or performance), the best opportunity for your organization is to generate design improvements trough Kaikaku.