Concurrent engineering

Although concurrent design and manufacturing requires extensive communication and coordination between disciplines, the benefits can increase the profit of a business and lead to a sustainable environment for product development.

Concurrent design and manufacturing can lead to a competitive advantage over other businesses as the product may be produced and marketed in less time.

The elements of concurrent engineering that were utilized were cross-functional teams as well as fast time-to-market and considering manufacturing processes when designing.

[5] By involving multiple disciplines in decision making and planning, concurrent engineering has made product development more cost and time efficient.

The fact that concurrent engineering could result in faster time-to-market is already an important advantage in terms of a competitive edge over other producers.

Beginning in the early 1990s, CE was also adapted for use in the information and content automation field, providing a basis for organization and management of projects outside the physical product development sector for which it was originally designed.

By locating and fixing these issues early, the design team can avoid what often become costly errors as the project moves to more complicated computational models and eventually into the actual manufacturing of hardware.

This includes establishing user requirements, propagating early conceptual designs, running computational models, creating physical prototypes, and eventually manufacturing the product.

Incremental information sharing helps minimize the chance that concurrent product realization will lead to surprises.

It embodies team values of co-operation, trust and sharing in such a manner that decision making is by consensus, involving all perspectives in parallel, from the beginning of the product life cycle.The second one is by Winner, et al., 1988: Concurrent Engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including, manufacturing and support.

This approach is intended to cause the developers from the very outset to consider all elements of the product life cycle, from conception to disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements.

[16]Concurrent and Sequential engineering cover the same stages of design and manufacturing, however, the two approaches vary widely in terms of productivity, cost, development and efficiency.

As seen in the figure, sequential engineering begins with customer requirements and then progresses to design, implementation, verification and maintenance.

Although there are more complex and numerous processes involved in product development, the concept that the analogy provides is enough to understand the benefits that come with concurrent design and manufacturing.