Concurrent engineering frameworks

The environment surrounded by industries is represented by the 3Cs : Customers, Competition, and Changes. The 3Cs drive industries to pursue external business targets such as customer's needs and marketplaces with BPR (Business Process Reengineering). BPR addresses core business process. One of these core business processes is product development. This product development process has been reengineered by the concept of CE (Concurrent Engineering). The aim of the paper is to build frameworks of CE to clarify the CE concept. This paper begins with investigating the product development process from the perspectives of three drivers: cost, quality and speed. CE frameworks are then followed. The first frmework is concerned with the CE definition and thus three keyphrases are extracted : from the outset, concurrent design and systematic approach. Concerned with the CE implementation, the second framework is composed of five components: generalist & specialist, cross-function team, enabling tools & techniques, success metrics, and total visibility. This paper concludes that the CE practice is hard to achieve because of the 'dont't-tell-them-early' attitude of upstream people, and the 'wait-and-see' attitude of downstream people. As resolution, a change management program is recommended that changes an employees mind-set. This paper also supposes computer systems which facilitate and keep automatic track of the CE process as engineered. Finally it gives a warning that computer systems alone do not guarantee success without being preceded by process re-engineering.