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. •A new Value Engineering procedure integrating Target Costing and Target Pricing.•Definition of an optimization model for product quality planning.•Proof of strong NP-hardness for the general case of the planning problem.•A Dynamic Programming solution procedure that generates optimal quality plans.•A variance analysis scheme provides managerial insight into the quality process.