- Concurrent engineering, also known as simultaneous engineering, is a method of designing and developing products, in which the different stages run simultaneously, rather than consecutively.
- In a concurrent engineering environment, teams of experts from different disciplines are formally encouraged to work together to ensure that design progresses smoothly and that all participants share the same, current information.
- It decreases product development time and also the time to market, leading to improved productivity and reduced costs.
- Time has become a key driver of competitive success, from design and development to the actual launch of a new product or service. In other words, concurrent engineering aims at achieving throughput time reductions by planning and executing design and development activities in parallel, or by striving for maximum overlap between activities that cannot be completely executed in parallel
- Therefore, concurrent engineering is based on the premise that the parallel execution of major design components will decrease the throughput time of projects, thus reducing the time-to-market for new products and services.
- For example, applying concepts of parallelism during the Boeing 777 transport design resulted in a time compression of 1.5 years as compared to its predecessor, the Boeing 767. Concurrent engineering allowed the Boeing Company to introduce the new airplane in time to limit the advantage of its competitor, Airbus.
Mech Webster 