ASSIGNMENT #2.2 : CONCURRENT ENGINEERING

What Is Concurrent Engineering?

Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated between concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers from the beginning to consider all elements of the product life cycle from conception to disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements.

Base on previous product development process in Figure 1, or so called Serial Engineering, it follows sequential in nature during product development. Each discipline performs its own individual function and passed the results to the next discipline in the serial chain. Typically, there is very little or no interaction among various disciplines. Thus, this leads to problems later in the development cycle and the continual changes usually must be made as problems are usually discovered later in the process. This will invariably adds to overall development cost and time to market since the product not meet specification. As result, the feedback has to be reviewed again to earlier process.

So, majority of developers have introduced with the Concurrent Engineering in serving them throughout the product development process.

Figure 2 shows the Concurrent Engineering (CE) Approach in producing a product. It has emerged as discipline to help in reducing cost, better quality, and improved delivery performance from product conception to product development for new products and product modifications. All the disciplines are involved to work closely together in parallel right from the early stage of the product design and development stage. Working in parallel or concurrent activities allows multi-disciplinary teams to rectify any problems at the earliest stage. This will prevent any design problems to surface later in the process and help to reduce the number of checks & test required at later process.

            Thus, Concurrent Engineering (CE) has integrated to reduce the elapsed time required to bring a new product to the market consecutively.