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About The Author
Concurrent Engineering
The concurrent engineering design process was developed to ameliorate the
problems associated with the over the wall design process. You can learn about the
over-the-wall design process by clicking here. In short the over-the-wall design
process consisted of different departments in a company working on designs in
isloation and then Throwing the project over the wall to the next department. The
complaints about the over-the-wall design systems are discussed below.
The products took too long to get to the market.
Because many products has to be sent back to previous departments for rework,
the length of time for a product to get through the system to market was long.
Often competitive products would be the first on the market and take the majority
of the profits.
The products produced by the over-the-wall method cost too much.
The root cause of this problem could be traced back to the fact that manufacturing
engineers were not consulted about the design until the design engineers had
finished the design. Often the manufacturing engineers requests for design
changes to make the design easier and cheaper caused delays while the design
engineers considered the impact of the requested design changes. Figure one
shows that early design decisions have much greater impact on the final cost of a
product than do decisions made later in the design process. For instance a car
manufacturers decision about what type of drive train to use is made early in the
design process and has a huge impact on the cost of a car. Should the car be
powered by a gas engine, diesel engine, electric motor, a hybrid system or a fuel
cell? Whereas, the plastic slected to manufacture an interior trim piece has a much
more limited impact on the cost of a car and is made much later in the design
process. You can read a funny story about design for manufacture by clicking here.
Figure 1. The cost impact of making a design decision as a function of the stage in
the deisgn process.
The products did not meet the needs of the customers.
After marketing had identified the need and passed it to the research engineers to
investigate the possible technologies, the marketing people were not consulted.
Often the needs of the customer were lost in the process and the back and forth
between the departments. Therefore the final product did not meet the needs of
the customer.