The concurrent engineering approach to product development

To maintain the flexible and fast coordination of different design and manufacturing processes for make-to-order production the concurrent engineering (CE) approach seems to be a viable alternative, since classical computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) theories are not always applicable. The authors present a way of implementing the CE approach to establish a conceptual model of an intelligent system for designing and/or redesigning the manufacturing environment, and the joint production control processes with a coupled computer control architecture. The CE approach is demonstrated by means of some experiences on a prototype of a cooperative system for a manufacturing environment to design the processes and the plant-layout of production facilities for a given set of products. Knowledge processing technology was applied for representing and processing knowledge about make-to-order production systems. While utilizing these methodologies and procedures in a blackboard architecture, different advanced design tools were applied for system design and performance analysis. >

This paper presents an integrated concurrent engineering (CE) approach to the design and manufacture of complex-shaped components. A virtual computer integrated manufacturing system for the approach was constructed with various commercial software packages. CE combined with information technology (IT) is used for the design and manufacture. The advantages and disadvantages of the software used were analysed. Pro/ENGINEER (Pro/E) software is used for the main role in the approach. The finite-element method (FEM) and optimisation tools are merged into the approach which is carried out in a Pro/MECHANICA and ANSYS environment. The integration approach is from the conceptual design to the end of manufacturing. The use of a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) was integrated in the approach. In order to evaluate the approach the development of a scroll compressor was taken as a case study. The authors have used Visual C ++ programming to create CAD software for the conceptual design of the scroll compressor. A trial has been implemented on a CNC machining centre and a real orbiting scroll part was made. The authors analysed the results and sequencing problems during the implementation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential of the approach in mechanical product design.

Improvement of Take-away Water Cup Design by using Concurrent Engineering Approach

Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) Hyderabad, one of the R&D labs of the Ministry of Defence, Government of India, was entrusted with the responsibility of simultaneous development and production of four different missile systems. In the early 1980s, when the programme started, the concept of concurrent engineering was little known. However, in order to meet the programme objectives and environmental challenges, DRDL evolved a new approach with an appropriate organisational structure and management tools. These tools and techniques fall under the broad category of concurrent engineering. This paper brings out the environmental drivers which provided impetus for the organisation to go for a radically new approach – the concurrent engineering approach. With the help of three case studies, the paper also brings out how these practices were customised and implemented in different scenarios to develop and produce the systems with reduced development-to-production cycle time still meeting user requirements.

The benefits associated with implementing concurrent engineering mean that more and more companies are looking to use it for their new product introduction process. Previously, methods for monitoring product development have included the use of metrics. “Predictive” metrics have also been used, but have mainly tended to focus on the software and firmware aspects of a product. Outlines metric ideas, but takes a holistic view of the product under development. Details an industrial case study which shows how information obtained during the product development process can be used to produce predictive metrics. These can be used as a means to make the development process more efficient. Discusses the benefits of predictive metrics and the impact that concurrent engineering approach has on the ability to provide these metrics.

There are few studies that have found an adequate means of assessing firms based on their specific needs for a concurrent engineering (CE) approach. Managers interested in introducing CE have little choice but to rely on their past experiences of introducing change. Using data gleaned from a nine month case study, a British-wide survey and a series of in-depth interviews, this paper summarizes the findings of a research study that examines how firms orientate themselves towards change and how they go about introducing CE to their operations. The data show that there are many benefits to introducing CE and that firms differ with respect to their needs for the CE approach. A tentative means to assess CE ‘needs’ is proposed which is based on the level of complexity of goods produced by firms. The method is currently being developed and extended to provide an applications-based framework to assist firms to improve their new product development performance.

Modern design concepts are focused on the product life-cycle, such that all the aspects of designed systems and their corresponding dependencies are considered. These conditions are fulfilled by the concurrent engineering (CE) approach, which creates a new context for design and management according to which the life-cycle design is performed by functional and disciplinary heterogeneous teams. This results in a new concept for computer aided design (CAD) that must support system life-cycle analysis and design. Defining the CE context for electronics, this paper determines the main elements of the CE-CAD concept, and the basic functional architecture of the corresponding environment in creating a total product design, highlighting, as a result, the concept of a virtual 'world' distributed manufacturing enterprise.

The space systems business, along with many others in the manufacturing sector, has necessarily been forced to drastically reduce the time to market for its products. One of the many organisational responses to this imperative has been to adopt a concurrent engineering (CE) approach. This paper describes some collaborative work between the Systems Engineering Group (SEG) at De Montfort University and the UK Manufacturing Operations Directorate (DOUK) of MMS. The work entails the development of a prototypical multimedia communications package to support a CE culture within DOUK. The package is referred to as the Concurrent Engineering Handbook (CEH). The CEH was originally hosted on a hypertext environment known as FrameMaker/sup TM/, but later changed to Netscape/sup TM/, because its documents were portable, easier to manage and distribute on a network of computer sites. These capabilities were exploited to not only educate users about company processes, but to aid the CE approach. This paper gives an overview of CE and why it is used, as well as highlighting some of the problems encountered when companies adopt this approach. A description of the CEH's architecture is presented, and how it attempts to address the problems of implementing CE. The architecture of the CEH provides an insight into how the information is arranged on disk, and features of the page design which will facilitate page reuse.

The concurrent engineering approach seems to be a new way to minimise cost and delay for product design. However, few experiments using distributed skills are described in the literature. This paper describes a concurrent engineering experiment involving four French academic laboratories, to design an automated assembling bank for an aeroplane fuselage. The chosen concurrent design process is described first. Then, all the communications accomplished within the 2 years of the project and their protocols are described. From their study, the cooperation involved is modelled and analysed using the concept of the cooperation graph. This experiment produces advice on how to succeed in a concurrent engineering project.

Concurrent Engineering (CE) approaches depend heavily on efficient and reliable communication between the people involved in the design, engineering, industrialisation and manufacturing of products. To address this need, we propose an approach to facilitate joint solutions to product design problems within a CE integrated team by supporting textual and graphical information in the form of sketches. We introduce a new and ergonomic groupware tool working on a network of PCs: MICA-Graph. This involves the exchange of technical messages (textual and graphical) and capitalisation of relevant knowledge. Our tool supports the description of technical problems, message exchange among users, monitoring of the problem solving process and the documentation of technical solutions. It also provides facilities to structure and archive knowledge and know-how learned from new methods of design sketch retrieval. The tool has been developed and evaluated, primarily to feed back manufacturing knowledge to design teams in the context of product change requests.

An integrated graphical user interface (GUI) for concurrent engineering design of mechanical parts

Manufacturing in blow molding: Time reduction and part quality improvement

The concept of concurrent engineering (CE) has changed the traditional process of design to an integrated process, comprising all aspects of design, manufacturing, costing, process control etc. In composite product development, CE is adopted to enhance quality, to reduce time of production, and to reduce cost. There have been several models that consider design for minimal weight, design for cost, design for quality, design for manufacture, design for reliability, design for metal inserts, design for environment etc., separately for composite product development. In the present paper, we apply the graph theoretic approach to DFX analysis methodology for design of composite products. The DFX methodology is new to composite design, and is applied to study the various DFX components, like design for cost (DFC), design for manufacture (DFM), and design for minimal weight (DFMW), simultaneously. In this study, an example for development of fiber reinforced polymer composite (FRP) drive shafts is taken up. Several material combinations like E-glass/epoxy, E-glass/polyester, and HM-carbon/epoxy composite materials are compared in light of their performance with conventional steel material. The concurrent graph theoretic approach with a permanent function is used to account for the interdependencies existing among the design parameters in studying DFMW, DFM, and DFC.

The point-based approach consists of committing a set of requirements and a single design solution from the design space. This approach is time-consuming and often leads to deadline excess when developing a new complex system such as mechatronic systems. In fact, this approach could generate iterative loops between engineers in the downstream design stage to evaluate the manufacturability and the quality of the developed system. To overcome this issue, introducing a model-based system engineering (MBSE) approach in the upstream design stage hinged on set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE) principles is a good solution to diminish the exchange loops between engineers and to enhance efficiency in the design process. This approach consists in evaluating a large set of system solutions, then gradually narrowing these solutions until converging to a limited set of optimized solutions. In this article, a novel approach entitled “Model based for reliability and manufacturability analysis (MBRMA)” and based on model-based system engineering and set-based concurrent engineering in the preliminary design phases is used to filter out weak or costly solutions over time and to assess system engineer when adopting trade-off analysis. First, customer requirements, functional and structural aspect of the system are defined using SysML diagrams. Next, the application of the algorithm allows narrowing the design space, and finally, a trade-off analysis is carried out to select the best system architecture. The first contribution of this article is the creation of novel stereotypes of composition and allocation flows in a profile diagram between functions and alternative solutions. The second contribution is the implementation of an algorithm to analyze system robustness and to converge on the final set of optimized solutions. To test this newly developed model “model based for reliability and manufacturability analysis (MBRMA),” a case study of an air conditioning electrical compressor is considered to illustrate the various stages of this concurrent engineering approach.

The demand for faster and more cost-effective product developments encouraged the creation of new project management platforms, designed to expedite and streamline new product development, R&D-to-market. Systems such as Design for Manufacture (DMF), Integrated Product and Process Development (IPPD), Structured Systems Design (SSD), Stage-Gate Processes, and perhaps the oldest and most widely used IPD concept of Concurrent Engineering (CE), all promise more flexible and more effective new product development processes. Yet, for many managers the results were mixed regarding overall project performance. The paper reports the findings of a three-year field study of over 60 complex technology-based product developments in 10 companies. The drivers and barriers toward cross-functional cooperation are examined together with the type of work processes, leadership style and organizational environment most conducive to effective product integration. Specific suggestions are being made for enhancing cross-functional linkages, involvement, commitment, communications and decision-making, factors that ultimately determine new product success