TABLE OF CONTENTS Concurrent engineering may be described as the simultaneous, interactive, and interdisciplinary involvement of people belonging to diverse backgrounds including design, manufacturing, and field support working together to reduce the product development cycle while ensuring factors such as reliability, performance, quality, and support responsiveness [1].
Past experience indicates that there are many benefits of concurrent engineering and integrated product development, including 65% to 90% fewer engineering changes, 30% to 70% less development time, 200% to 600% higher quality, 20% to 110% higher white-collar productivity, and 20% to 90% less time to market [2, 3].
Although concurrent engineering has been around in one form or another for a very long time, its modern form may be attributed to the 1980s when the Ford Motor Company practiced the team, or concurrent engineering, approach in the design and development of its Taurus model [4 8]. In 1982, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) initiated a project to develop ways and means to improve concurrency in the design process and in 1987 the final results of this study were released [9].
In 1986, the term concurrent engineering was coined by the Institute for Defense Analyses in its report R-338 [10]. The following year, DARPA formed a working group composed of experts from government, industry, and academia to evaluate the implications of simultaneous engineering for defense sourcing [4]. The group wholeheartedly supported the concept of simultaneous engineering but rechristened it to concurrent engineering.
By the end of 1991, the U.S. government...
