Concurrent engineering

Introduction

Concurrent engineering ('CE) is a design methodology originally formulated by the CALS/ Concurrent Engineering Committee in the summer of 1991 in response to growing concerns within the electronics industry and the Department of Defense (DoD) that there was something significantly wrong with the design practices of the entire electronics industry. It was hypothesized that the serial nature of the design processes and progressive specialization within the vast array of engineering disciplines necessary to yield complex electronic systems had evolved to the point of stifling the product development cycle. Cost overruns and delayed schedules were common place and everyone, especially the customer base wanted a solution. A few individuals that understood the complete design process came together under the auspices of the CALS Electronics Work Group to study the problem and propose solutions. They understood that excessive design errors resulted from the serial, compartmentalization approach to design and that the design iteration that resulted from these errors were the primary cause of both cost and schedule problems. A new design process called Concurrent Engineering was the end-product of a two yearlong study conducted by the CALS Concurrent Engineering Committee. This major revision to standard design practices emphasized parallel, inter-disciplinary collaboration to return to what was termed the Craftsman Model. The concept of the Craftsman Model along with the other fundamental concepts of Concurrent Engineering were originally presented in the final publication, “First Principles of Concurrent Engineering, A Competitive Strategy for Electronic Product Development". The Craftsman Model hypothesized that in the 19th and early 20th century, before manufactured products became too complex, a single craftsman could envision the entire design process, wherein every detail of the final design resulted from a conscience trade-off between competing design options within the mind of a craftsman - with a broad range of essential expertise. As electronic product became more complex, a large variety of engineering design disciplines were required to meet ever increasing requirements. These engineering disciplines had their own college curriculums, specialized tools, specialized languages and typically resided in different matrix organizations. The typical design process of the electronics industry of the early 1990s passed a "design package” serially through a series of design specialists who were not rewarded for their inter-disciplinary communication skills. For example, a thermodynamics engineer would optimize a design without any real consideration of competing requirements levied on manufacturability, testability, packaging constraints, structural integrity or the electrical performance of the end product. When mistakes were found as the design package was passed serially from one discipline to the next, the serial process started over again or to save time, steps would be skipped, thus introducing more errors detected in the more costly test and qualification phase of development. The new Concurrent Engineering process proposed the formation Integrated Product Teams (IPT) composed of design specialist appointed by matrix organizations. These specialists were rewarded for their collaborate skills and were tasked with real-time team design trade-offs or to delegate trade-offs back to the matrix organization with the IPT having final design authority over the design solutions - thus returning to the Craftsman Model. The IPT was typically co-chaired by a senior systems engineer and sometimes a representative of management to make sure cost and schedule considerations were considered in high impact design decisions. American industry has generally accepted the design practices of Concurrent Engineering, initially because of required compliance to DoD acquisition requirements for IPT design practices (note: DoD sponsored the industry CALS Concurrent Engineering Committee) and then because of significant reductions in both cost and time to deliver a product. </ref> group="CALS Concurrent Engineering Committee">Linton, Larry; Griffin, Larry; Hall, Don; Hutchison, Katherine; Hoffman, Dennis; Evanczuk, Steve; Sullivan, Steve (September 30, 1991). First Principles of Concurrent Engineering, A Competitive Strategy For Electronic Product Development. Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO). </ref>

History

The term "Concurrent Engineering" was first conceived by members of the CALS Summer Study Group for Electronic Systems which subdivided to form the Concurrent Engineering Task Force. This Task Force organized the Concurrent Engineering Conference, under the sponsorship of Col. Larry Griffin, DoD Deputy Under Secretary for Acquisition. This conference invited a broad range of industry executives, especially those actively seeking better design practices, to come and brief their best ideas and to agree to participate in two days of workshops. Member of the Concurrent Engineering Task Force were assigned to chair each of the workshops. The chairperson of each workshop was asked to filter the ideas and present them to the Col Griffin and the full task force. The Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) was contracted to publish the finding of the conference under the title The Role of Concurrent Engineering in Weapon System Acquisition. The outcome of the conference was somewhat disappointing in that almost all the concepts presented fell under the category of quality improvements, whereas the Task Force was looking to address necessary changes to the engineering process. It was decided that the ideas gleaned from the conference would be refined and released by the DoD under the Total Quality Management Initiative, which in itself had a major impact on American industry quality practices. To address recognized issues of engineering design process and propose solutions in the form of principles of Concurrent Engineering, Larry Linton was asked to select members and chair the CALS / Concurrent Engineering Committee. This committee started with thirty members representing almost every major defense contractor and a few members from the commercial sector. After two years of meetings, the committee selected six members to draft a final report of their findings. This final report was entitled First Principles of Concurrent Engineering, A Competitive Strategy For Electronic Product Development.

The Impact of Concurrent Engineering

While the editorial and writing committee were drafting a final report, a series of Concurrent Engineering Workshops were organized with the intended purpose of influencing a next generation of design automation tools, specifically Computer Aided Design (CAD). Member of the committee were also encouraged to offer papers for industry journals to encourage the adoption of Concurrent Engineering. One of the committee members, Steve Evanczuk, was the chief editor of the popular magazine "Computer Aided Design". Steve devoted an entire issue to Concurrent Engineering. The three industry leaders in CAD attended all the workshops, met with members of the committee and were influenced by the media campaign. By the time of the publication of the final committee’s report and the conclusion of the third annual Concurrent Engineering Workshop, each had made a significant dollar investment in tailoring their commercial CAD toolsets to facilitate a concurrent engineering / integrated product team design process. Mentor Graphics, the industry leader at the time was represented on the committee by Don Carter, one of their founders. Mentor Graphics released an entirely new design platform that integrated many principles of Concurrent Engineering. By the end of the 1990s, Concurrent Engineering and Integrated Product Teams were an integral part of the electronic industry's design processes. Concurrent Engineering is now so seamless integrated into product development that little, if any thought is given to the fact that a decade earlier, the entire electronics industry had undergone a paradigm shift away from the stagnation of specialization. Ironically this was in direct opposition to the conclusions of Adam Smith, the author of the Wealth of Nation, who concluded that increased specialization was the foundation of free market capitalism. In 1776 it would have been difficult to anticipate the consequences of evolved specialization.

Other referenced Publications

1. Primary reference: Larry Linton, et al, First Principles of Concurrent Engineering, A Competitive Strategy For Electronic Product Development, Washington DC, US Government Printing Office, 9/1991. 2. A 2008 publication described concurrent engineering as a new design management system that has matured in recent years to become a well-defined systems approach to optimizing design and engineering cycles. 3. Concurrent engineering has been implemented in a number of companies, organizations, and universities, most notably in the aerospace industry. Beginning in the early 1990s, CE was also adapted for use in the information and content automation field, providing a basis for organization and management of projects outside the physical product development sector for which it was originally designed. Organizations such as the European Space Agency's Concurrent Design Facility make use of concurrent design to perform feasibility studies for future missions. 4. 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, production, assembly, testing, maintenance, environmental impact, and finally disposal and recycling—should be taken into careful consideration in the early design phases. 5. The second concept is that design activities should all be occurring at the same time, i.e., concurrently. The idea is that the concurrent nature of these activities 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.

6. As mentioned above, part of the design process is to ensure that the product's entire 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 this process is taking into full account funding, workforce capability, and time requirements. A 2006 study claimed that a correct implementation of the concurrent design process can save a significant amount of money, and that organizations have been moving to concurrent design for this reason. It is also highly compatible with systems thinking and green engineering.

7. Concurrent engineering replaces the more traditional sequential design flow, or "Waterfall Model".

8. In Concurrent Engineering an iterative or integrated development method is used instead. The Waterfall method moves in a linear fashion, starting with user requirements and sequentially moving forward to design and implementation, until you have a finished product. In this design system, a design team would not quickly look backward or forward from the step it is on to fix or anticipate problems. In the case that something does go wrong, the design usually must be scrapped or heavily altered. The concurrent or iterative design process encourages prompt changes of tack, so 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.

9. A significant part of the concurrent design method is that the individual engineer is given much more say in the overall design process due to the collaborative nature of concurrent engineering. Giving the designer ownership is claimed to improve the productivity of the employee and quality of the product, based on the assumption that people who are given a sense of gratification and ownership over their work tend to work harder and design a more robust product, as opposed to an employee that is assigned a task with little say in the general process.

10. Concurrent design comes with a series of challenges, such as implementation of early design reviews, dependency on efficient communication between engineers and teams, software compatibility, and opening up the design process. This design process usually requires that computer models (computer aided design, finite element analysis) are exchanged efficiently, something that can be difficult in practice. If such issues are not addressed properly, concurrent design may not work effectively. It is important to note that although the nature of some project activities project imposes a degree of linearity—completion of software code, prototype development and testing, for example—organizing and managing project teams to facilitate concurrent design can still yield significant benefits that come from the improved sharing of information.

Definitions

Cross-functional teams Cross-functional teams include people from different area of the workplace that are all involved in a particular process, including manufacturing, hardware and software design, marketing, and so forth. Concurrent product realization Doing several things at once, such as designing various subsystems simultaneously, is critical to reducing design time and is at the heart of concurrent engineering. Incremental information sharing Incremental information sharing helps minimize the chance that concurrent product realization will lead to surprises. "Incremental" meaning that as soon as new information becomes available, it is shared and integrated into the design. Cross-functional teams are important to the effective sharing of information in a timely fashion. Integrated project management Integrated project management ensures that someone is responsible for the entire project, and that responsibility is not abdicated once one aspect of the work is done. Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to integrated product development that emphasizes the response to customer expectations. It embodies team values of co-operation, trust and sharing in such a manner that decision-making is by consensus, involving all perspectives in parallel, from the beginning of the Product Lifecycle. Concurrent Engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including, manufacturing and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers from the very outset to consider all elements of the product life cycle, from conception to disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements.<ref>Winner, Robert I., Pennell, James P., Bertrand, Harold E., and Slusarczuk, Marko M. G. (1991). "The Role of Concurrent Engineering in Weapons System Acquisition", Institute for Defense Analyses Report R-338, December 1988, p The following is a partial list of companies, agencies and universities that use CE. • Northrop Grumman • Ball Aerospace • Lockheed Martin • European Space Agency]] Concurrent Design Facility
• NASA Team X - Jet Propulsion Laboratory • NASA Integrated Design Center (IDC), Mission Design Lab (MDL), and Instrument Design Lab (IDL) - Goddard Space Flight Center • CNES – French Space Agency • Italian Space Agency |ASI – Italian Space Agency • Boeing • EADS Astrium – Satellite Design Office • Thales Alenia Space • The Aerospace Corporation Concept Design Center • STV Group (United States)|STV Incorporated • German Aerospace Center Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt • Schlumberger