In this paper, a new quality-oriented control approach for Value Engineering is proposed.
It is reasonably applied within a Target Costing and Target Pricing concept in order to generate,
maintain and process reliable data. On the basis of Target costs and prices, the approach
determines the quality program of the relevant product core components as well as of the
quality-related production stages. In order to provide decision support for various applications
in business, this new approach is based on a discrete quality measure that allows for
the mapping of multidimensional dependencies. After mathematically defining the underlying
quality planning model, we propose an exact Dynamic Programming approach for determining
optimal programs. It is shown that this procedure is strongly polynomial if the number
of resulting intermediate product quality levels does not increase exponentially. Subsequently,
in order to provide decision support for the level of real-time Value Engineering, a variance
analysis scheme for examining the consequences of actual decisions is proposed. In addition
to controlling and understanding the process of decision-making in sales and production departments,
its iterative application makes it possible to systematically attain insights into the
controlled processes and, in doing so, supports decision-oriented management accounting.