Concurrent Engineering

Concurrent Engineering, doing things parallely

Concurrent Engineering is about conducting, in parallel, the maximum independant of sequential constraints activities.

Parallelism should be understood as doing development tasks side by side, like engineering product and related production process, as well as developing simultaneously several solutions. This latter in order to discriminate the best ones the soonest possible and avoid costly (in currency and time) iterations in classic "cut and try" way.

Concurrent Engineering is more generally about anticipation of futur activities and bringing them timely forward in the developpment process. Typically developing tools when mockup or prototype do not even exist.

Breakthrough vs. sequential approach

This parallel approach is a breakthrough compared to the strictly timely sequential approach. It requires multifunctional teams gathering different stake holders involved in the product development project. The teams will have to consider the whole product lifecycle at once.

Bringing together early the downstream functions (including some suppliers) allow early detection and mitigation of mistakes, misunderstandings or poor tradeoffs.

Examples:

• Assembly constraints in production (Design for Manufacturing and Assembly DFMA) with head of production and product + process engineering
• Packagings, distribution, storage constraints with logistics and supply chain,
• Servicing, parts replacement with maintenance or after sales.

Otherwise, late discovery and countermeasures may lead to postponements, soaring costs or carry problems which are not to be settled in an economic manner (Initial choices are done...).
In most critical ways, these types of problems can disqualify a produit on the market!

Globally, with concurrent engineering, product quality is improved (done right at once), costs of latter changes eliminated and time to market reduced.