Integrating concurrent engineering into undergraduate design and research experiences

After graduation, engineering and engineering technology students are expected to enter the highly competitive, global work place of the 90's and beyond as immediately productive members of manufacturing or development teams. In order to excel in that target market, students must experience and practice concurrent engineering, design engineering and team development skills throughout their undergraduate curriculum. Students in the Engineering Technology Department at Western Washington University actively participate in a wide variety of undergraduate design and undergraduate research projects where concurrent engineering and team work are expected and emphasized. This paper describes how the faculty within Engineering Technology Department have integrated concurrent engineering principles and design throughout the curriculum and gives several program and project examples. The paper also presents specific examples of where multi-disciplinary teams of students have actively participated in undergraduate research experiences and learned much from active team development and integrated design. There are six different academic programs (with ten options for graduation) within the Department of Engineering Technology: Electronics Engineering Technology, Manufacturing Engineering Technology, Plastics Engineering Technology, Industrial Technology, Industrial Design and Technology Education. Because of the diversity of program areas within the department, core technical members of a concurrent engineering team are easy to find. Alliances with the College of Business and Economics, as well as established ties to the other programs within the College of Arts and Sciences, allows multi-disciplinary teams to form as needed. Marketing, accounting and technical communication majors are often the most popular additions to design or competition teams. This paper describes specific design, research and student competition examples where concurrent engineering team work has been successful. It also describes the extra faculty efforts needed to help the process to work. Curricular issues that have been modified within the manufacturing and plastics programs are also discussed.