Concurrent engineering

Simultaneous Engineering ( in The American: Concurrent Engineering, in German: "distributed concurrent development " ) refers to a procedure in product development. Thus, the development time of a new product is shortened, later production changes induced avoided and improve the overall coordination of development and production.

Basic idea of ​​the method is the temporal overlap of traditional consecutive workflows. Once in a workflow sufficient information has been developed, the next workflow is started in parallel. This results partly to overtime, you do not work with the final level of information, but the working basis can change at any time. But errors can be detected more rapidly and eliminated in time, before they cause major costs at a later stage ( see picture).

Particularly useful simultaneous engineering (SE ) is between the work processes of product development and production (medium ) planning:

Traditionally, product development and production planning two strictly separate, successive steps. First, the new product is designed and fully worked out (see the design process ). After the planning of production with which this product can be produced begins.

In the application of simultaneous engineering, production planning begins earlier. Once preliminary versions of the product are elaborated, is begun to plan their production. The development continues in parallel to it.

While both departments continue to work in their chosen field, we find a continuous exchange of information. Changes to the design must be incorporated into the planning of resources. Other way around, been a change of the structure of problems or opportunities for optimization in production.

Advantage of this approach is the time saved by the fact that the production possibilities and costs already checked and the means of production have already been partially planned when the product is fully developed. It can also be called by the paradox of the SE, as taken for each process step takes longer, but the sum of the process steps in turn is shorter than in the conventional method. This is due to the parallelization of processing steps already described.

However, another important aspect is the early uncover design-related production problems:

The earlier a design change is made, the less costs incurred in the rule. Worst case with the traditional approach can be: The product is completely finished, but is impossible to establish. It needs to be redesigned so. Simultaneous engineering helps to move those findings and consequential amendments to an earlier time.