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This paper elucidates the major issues complicating strategic investment decisions in manufacturing waste systems. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP), an innovative approach in decision theory, is applied to these decisions in a manufacturing plant at General Motors Corporation. When compared with capital budgeting models, AHP is found to offer a superior approach due to its comprehensive mechanism, a feature urgently needed to handle the increasing legal, economic and technological complexities of manufacturing wastes.

This paper presents an application of target cost management (TCM) to the design of product safety in the automobile industry. Product safety occupies a prominent position among corporate strategic plans because safety issues can drive a company to the brink of bankruptcy and even threaten the entire existence of an industry. Safety issues contain legal, marketing, technological, cost and other dimensions, all of which demand ever-greater emphasis on this issue. At the same time, safety has become a moving target whose meaning is subject to court interpretation and societal norms. However, safety cannot be augmented infinitely. A manufacturer is constrained by cost and profitability benchmarks. Companies can use TCM to optimize their focus on safety issues. This paper shows how value engineering (VE), a TCM technique, can help minimize the costs of safety components, while satisfying engineering, product and customer concerns.