Concurrent Engineering

INTRODUCTION

          Concurrent Engineering (CE) is an integrated product development approach, CE emphasizes the response to customer expectations by producing better, cost effective and much faster products. It also supports multidisciplinary team values of cooperation and trust; thus, sharing and exchanging required knowledge and information in a manner that will enhance decision making processes and also emphasis on simultaneous consideration during the design stage and all the other Product Life Cycle (PLC) aspects of the product development. One of the most salient means to reduce development time is through the use of “concurrent engineering.”

          Concurrent engineering is defined by the Institute for Defence Analysis (IDA) as: “the systematic approach to the integrated concurrent design of products and related processes, including manufacture and support. Thus, PLC management confronts the need to balance fast response to changing consumer demands with competitive pressure to seek cost reductions in sourcing, manufacturing and distribution. It needs to be based on a close alignment between customer facing functions (e.g. marketing, sales, customer service) and supply functions (e.g. purchasing, manufacturing, logistics) Hence, Product life cycle (PLC) management as the integrated, information-driven approach to all aspects of a product's life, from concept to design, manufacturing, maintenance and removal from the market, has become a strategic priority in many company's boardrooms. According to; Concurrent engineering (CE) is an engineering management philosophy and a set of operating principles that guide a product development process through to an accelerated successful completion. In general CE values relay on a single, but powerful, principle that encourages the incorporation the later stages of production concerns into the upstream phases of a development process. This would lead to shorter development times, improved product quality, and lower development–production costs. 

          Concurrent engineering is hereby aimed at the timely availability of critical design information to all development participants. For most intricate engineering tasks all significant information required by a specific development team cannot be completely available at the start of that task. Therefore, CE requires the most of such information and the ability to share and communicate useful information on a timely basis with right experts. The concept of concurrent engineering (CE) has been known for quite a while now, and it has been widely recognized as a major enabler of fast and efficient product development. The basic premise for concurrent engineering revolves around two concepts. The first is the idea that all elements of a product’s life-cycle, from functionality, producibility, assembly, testability, maintenance issues, environmental impact and finally disposal and recycling, should be taken into careful consideration in the early design phases. The second concept is that the preceding design activities should all be occurring at the same time, i.e., concurrently. The idea is that the concurrent nature of these processes significantly increases productivity and product quality. This way, errors and redesigns can be discovered early in the design process when the project is still flexible. By locating and fixing these issues early, the design team can avoid what often become costly errors as the project moves to more complicated computational models and eventually into the actual manufacturing of hardware.

          As mentioned above, part of the design process is to ensure that the entire product's life cycle is taken into consideration. This includes establishing user requirements, propagating early conceptual designs, running computational models, creating physical prototypes and eventually manufacturing the product. Included in the process is taking into full account funding, work force capability and time. A study in 2006 claimed that a correct implementation of the concurrent design process can save a significant amount of money, and that organizations have been moving to concurent design for this reason.

          Concurrent engineering replaces the more traditional sequential design flow, or ‘Waterfall Model’. In Concurrent engineering an iterative or integrated development method is used instead. The difference between these two methods is that the ‘Waterfall’ method moves in a linear fashion by starting with user requirements and sequentially moving forward to design, implementation and additional steps until you have a finished product. In this design system, a design team would not look backwards or forwards from the step it is on to fix possible problems. In the case that something does go wrong, the design usually must be scrapped or heavily altered. On the other hand, the iterative design process is more cyclic in that, all aspects of the life cycle of the product are taken into account, allowing for a more evolutionary approach to design.

          The difference between the two design processes can be seen graphically in Figure 1

Types CE Multidisciplinary Teams

The CE applications depend on having a very well defined multidisciplinary team that is directed by the project leader or CE team leader. The vital CE team members consist of various departments such as: marketing, product engineering, manufacturing engineering, production engineering, finance, quality, logistic control, systems engineering, services and external consultancy or support teams as well as the customers and brokers. Some of the CE multidisciplinary team structures include:

􀂃 Functional Team: This type of multidisciplinary team verymuch relates to the orthodox over the wall way of communication where each engineer works in his/her own functional department. This team type should be avoided.

􀂃 Lightweight Team: This type of multidisciplinary CE team is mainly formed with members from the same department. This CE team type is related to part of the complete PLC.

􀂃 Heavyweight Team: This type of multidisciplinary CE team is a classical cross-functional CE team. With this type of CE team, members work part-time aside their original departmental duties.

􀂃 Autonomy Team: This type of multidisciplinary CE team is also a classical cross-functional team where members work full-time from their own offices and also used the departmental resources. With this type of CE team, regular meetings take place among the CE team members.

􀂃 Collocated Autonomy Team: This type of multidisciplinary CE is much like the autonomy team type of CE, just that, to enhance total dedication to the project as well as the integration of the team, members are brought together in the same working environment with the requisite resources to carry on their activities.

􀂃 The Virtual Team: This type of multidisciplinary CE team is a geographically distributed, thus, employing information technologies (i.e. internet/intranet, as well as telephone conferences and videoconferences) for communication among members.

CE PRODUCT LIFE-CYCLE (PLC)

          Every product or service has a certain life cycle. Product life-cycle (PLC) is the integrated, information-driven approach to all aspects of a product's life, from concept to design, manufacturing, maintenance and removal from the market, has become a strategic priority in many company's boardrooms. The life cycle refers to the time from the product’s first launch into the market until its final withdrawal, and it is split up in phases. During this time significant changes are made in the way that the product is behaving into the market, i.e. its reflection in respect of sales to the company that introduced it into the market. Since an increase in profits is the major goal of a company that introduces a product into a market, the product’s life cycle management is very important. Certain companies use strategic planning and others follow the basic rules of the different life cycle phase. The understanding of a product’s life cycle can help an industry to understand and realize when it is the time to market or withdraw a product from a market, its position in the market compared to competitors, and the product’s success or failure feasibility. For a company to fully understand the above and successfully manage a product’s life cycle, needs to develop strategies and methodologies. Industries should manage their products carefully over time to ensure that they deliver products that continue to meet customer needs. In this way industrial organizations maintain a cash flow that covers the company’s costs and delivers s a profit to it. Without this profit very few industries can survive in the longer term. The process of managing groups of brands and product lines is called group planning. The life of a product is the period over which it appeals to customers. The sales performance of any product rises from nothing when the product is introduced to the market reaches a peak and then declines to nothing again.

The classic product life cycle has five stages:

􀂃 Development

􀂃 Growth

􀂃 Maturity

􀂃 Decline and

􀂃 Withdrawal

The Product Life Cycle process is the mechanism through which products are managed from inception to retirement. The Product Life Cycle does not have to end. It can easily be prolonged by a range of marketing and production innovations.

A. Development Stage

At the development Stage market size and growth is slim. It is possible that substantial research and development costs have been incurred in getting the product to this stage. In addition, marketing costs may be high in order to test the market, undergo commencement promotion and set up distribution outlets. It is highly unlikely that industries will make profits on products at the development Stage. Products at this stage have to be carefully monitored to ensure that they start to grow and pick in the market. Otherwise, the best option may be to withdraw or end the product. The need for immediate profit is not a pressure as the lack of it is expected at this time. The product is promoted to create awareness of the market. If the product has no or few competitors, a skimming price strategy is employedto maximise profits. Limited numbers of product will be available in few outlets of distribution. The development stage encompasses a number of activities that will include:

􀂃 Concept: Overview of the customer requirement that an opportunity seeks to address, supported by evidence of market need.

􀂃 Definition: High-level definition of customer requirements and analysis of a business opportunity.

􀂃 Design: Analysis of customer requirements creating project plan and detailed product specification.

􀂃 Development: Data and software (CAD/CAM) development.

􀂃 Development Testing: Testing of the product against pre-defined test schedules to ensure satisfactory performance against customer requirements.

B. Concurrent engineering workflow

Concurrent engineering (CE) is a workflow that, instead of working chronologically through stages, carries out a number of tasks in parallel. For example: starting tool design before the detailed designs of the product are finished, or starting on detail design solid models before the concept design surface models are complete. Although this does not necessarily reduce the amount of manpower required for a project, it does drastically reduce lead times and thus time to market. Feature-based CAD systems have for many years allowed the simultaneous work on 3D solid model and the 2D drawing by means of two separate files, with the drawing looking at the data in the model; when the model changes the drawing will accordingly update. Some CAD packages also allow associative copying of geometry between files. This allows, for example, the copying of a part design into the files used by the tooling designer. The manufacturing engineer can then start work on tools before the final design freeze; when a design changes size or shapes the tool geometry will then update. Concurrent engineering also has the added benefit of providing better and more immediate communication between departments, reducing the chance of costly, late design changes. It adopts a problem prevention method as compared to the problem solving and re-designing method of traditional sequential engineering.

C. Design in context

Individual components cannot be constructed in isolation. Computer aided design - CAD; computer aided industrial design - CAiD models of components are designed within the context of part or the entire product being developed. This is achieved using assembly modelling techniques. Other components’ geometry can be seen and referenced within the CAD tool being used. The other components within the sub-assembly may or may not have been constructed in the same system, their geometry being translated from other collaborative product developments - CPD or computer aided manufacture CAM formats. Some assembly checking such as digital mock-up - DMU is also carried out using Product visualization software.

D. Growth Stage

The Growth Stage consists of rapid growth in sales and profits as the product or service is becoming established. Profits arise due to an increase in output (economies of scale) and possibly better prices for raw materials and manufactured components. There may be fewer competitors, sales are growing and profit margins are good. Now' is the time to work out how you can reduce the costs of delivering the new product. At this stage, it is cheaper for organizational industries to invest in increasing their business market share as well as enjoying the overall growth of the market. Accordingly, significant promotional resources are usually invested in products that are firmly in the Growth Stage. Competitors are attracted into the market with very similar offerings. Products become more profitable and companies form alliances, joint ventures and take over each other. Hence cost on advertising seems high and focuses upon building brand while market share tends to stabilize in this respect.

E. Maturity Stage

The Maturity Stage is, perhaps, the most common stage for all markets. It is at this stage that competition is most intense as companies fight to maintain their market share. Here, both marketing and finance become key activities. Marketing spent has to be monitored carefully, since any significant moves are likely to be copied by competitors. The Maturity Stage is the time when most profit is earned by the market as a whole. Any expenditure on research and development is likely to be restricted to product modification and improvement and perhaps to improve production efficiency and quality. Sales growth will slow or even stopped at this stage. Production and marketing costs may have been reduced, but increased competition would drive down prices. Hence, this moment is likely the best time to invest in a new product introduction or development. Those products that survive the earlier stages tend to spend longest in this phase. Sales grow at a decreasing rate and then stabilize. Producers attempt to differentiate products and brands, which are very essential to this. Price wars and intense competition occur. At this point, the market reaches saturation. Producers begin to leave the market due to poor margins.

F. Decline Stage

Decline Stage, denotes that the market is shrinking, reducing the overall amount of profit that can be shared among the remaining competitors. At this stage, great care has to be taken to manage the product carefully. It may be possible to take out some production cost, to transfer production to a cheaper facility, sell the product into other, cheaper markets, etc. Care should also be taken to control the amount of stocks of the product. Ultimately, depending on whether the product remains profitable, a company may decide to end the product. At this point, forward there is a downturn in the market. For example, more innovative products are introduced or consumer tastes have changed. There is intense price-cutting and many more products are withdrawn from the market. Profits can be improved by reducing marketing spend and cost cutting.

G. Withdrawal stage

In this stage product retirement takes place and a migration plan for the company products and markets will be established to support customers and partners. It is within this stage of the product life cycle that the recycling and final disposals of constituent components have to be addressed. It is of prime importance that this stage of the Product Life Cycle has to be fully considered during the product development stage.

CONCLUSION

CE approach as an industrial manufacturing organization’s competitive methodology or ‘best practice’ way of working, in a way, CE seems to be maturing from its original or orthodox methodology into some kind of extension, that is, by collaboration with some engineering ICT technologies for a better efficient and effective industrial competitiveness. This review report in its CE journal article survey has help to identify some suitable collaborative engineering ICT technology platforms such as SOA to enhance the collaborative effectiveness and efficiencies. This report in its findings also identified that, not much research has been conducted in the area of CE literature review as well as CE uses/values and CE extension/trends and perspectives; in that, over a decade (2000-2010) as reviewed and surveyed by this report its only just over 80 CE journal articles has been researched in the field of CE. Thus, on this note, it might be a time for industrial manufacturing organizations and scholars or the academia to reflect on their experiences and begin publishing for common good and also for industrial competitive advantage.