Concurrent Engineering

Abstract

The implementation of concurrent engineering in a project management framework will be explained holistically in this article. As concurrent engineering in its nature is highly dependent on the successful collaboration between the project’s organizational parties, this article will look into the following three aspects: the people participating in the project, the project process itself, and the technology and/or tools required to achieve these. The article will focus on how to make the concurrent engineering approach successful by addressing topics like the value of knowledge sharing, the necessity of interdisciplinary teams, effective project planning and what tools are required to achieve these aspects. Finally, the approach's advantages and disadvantages are discussed, and lastly they are paired with the preceding sequential engineering approach to address the situations in which one approach is better to apply than the other.

Big idea

Context

Concurrent engineering (CE) emerged in the 1980s as a result of the need for a more integrated method of operation to keep up with growing competition in the market, respond to a shorter product life-cycle, and meet shifting market and customer demands. Concurrent engineering was thought to be a potential answer to the issues faced by businesses at the time, in order to help them create cheaper goods that could be supplied faster and have higher functionality . Concurrent engineering functioned as a direct response and opposite to the previous traditional "over the wall", sequential engineering (SE) approach, with the overall goals of higher productivity and lower costs by shorter development time and shorter time-to-market.

“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 outset to consider all elements of the product life cycle from conception to disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements.” - Winner, R.J et al. (1988)

What is CE?

Concurrent engineering (CE) is neither a technique nor a tool. It is a manner of thinking that calls for a wide range of techniques and methods. The execution of a project's processes simultaneously with the participation of both upstream and downstream functions over the course of the project's life-cycle is the very essence of concurrent engineering .

The approach aims to decrease the number of larger iterations further down in the process, where the impact is much greater, by encountering and solving them as they appear in the earlier phases of the project (figure 1). This is made possible by the concurrent nature of the approach, in which integrated, multifunctional teams collaborate and work together simultaneously to address multiple project-related issues at the same time. As the control and responsibility is shared amongst the departments across the project’s phases, and because their activities overlap, they are able to identify potential problems as they appear and are able to address them faster. This is opposite to the traditional sequential engineering (SE) approach, where each activity is handled by one functional organization at a time (marketing, design, manufacturing etc.) and then thrown “over-the-wall” to the next organization (figure 2) without communication. The problem with this approach is that it might be in the very late stages of the process that a problem is identified, because of the lack of communication between organizations, which will result in the activity/product being sent back over-the-wall to fix the issues resulting in a prolonged process time and increased costs. By working concurrently the overall project duration is greatly reduced, as there is constant collaboration and iterations between the teams in the process, ensuring that larger and time-consuming issues will not occur in the final stages, when changes can be both costly and time-consuming. The reduction in time for CE compared to the sequential approach can be seen in figure 3. And the benefits of the implementation of CE in a project setting can also be deduced from the figure, as it results in an increased productivity and an overall lower cost of the project due to the reduction in duration. Which also means that the time-to-market for the potential product or service is also decreased, providing the company with a competitive advantage on the market compared to their competitors.

Application/Implementation

The concurrent character of the approach makes CE essentially a socio-technical concept. As previously stated, it calls for close coordination and communication across the project's many phases and disciplines. Since effective stakeholder communication, their willingness and ability to collaborate, and the support of tools and communication technologies are crucial components to support and sustain a CE project management strategy, the primary requirements for a successful concurrent engineering project are also related to these elements. These elements can collectively be classified as a company's organizational system, which is a holistic framework in which individuals carry out processes with the aid of tools (methods, tools, or technologies) in order to achieve specific objectives within the organization and/or project environment