Concurrent Engineering

Abstract

In this chapter, the philosophy behind Concurrent Engineering is presented as well as current approaches used to implement Concurrent Engineering. Concurrent Engineering design encourages the simultaneous consideration of all aspects of a product's life-cycle at the design stage. It has been shown to be successful in shortening product development time and costs by avoiding the typical problems associated with sequential design. Companies competing in today's global and volatile marketplace cannot afford long development leadtimes or high costs. Success stories in Concurrent Engineering have primarily relied on the design team approach, a collaboration of people from different departments representing different life-cycle perspectives. However, the design team approach and other approaches suffer in their inability to manage (i.e., store, access, update, etc.) the immense amount of data and information required to perform Concurrent Engineering.