The use of concurrent engineering in small to medium sized enterprises

In order to meet the requirements placed on them by customers companies must have a product development environment that uses all available resources to the best of their potential. There are four key objectives that have to be balanced: development speed, product cost, product performance and development program expense. Concurrent engineering (CE) is seen as a way to satisfy all these demands whilst sustaining the profitability of the manufacturer. This paper presents the results of a survey undertaken in the first six months of 1995. Most papers on CE have concentrated on large companies, whereas the survey undertaken for this research concentrated on small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The objective of the survey was to determine how many SMEs used CE techniques.