Optimize engineering processes with simultaneous engineering (SE) and concurrent engineering (CE)

The appropriate handling of time becomes one of the most important factors for industry to success because of globalization and market competition. Engineering processes should be optimized to achieve shorter "time to market". This paper deals with Simultaneous Engineering (SE), which means parallelizing formerly serial executed product development processes, and Concurrent Engineering (CE), which means to cut processes into smaller sub processes or activities and parallelize them, both to achieve less product development time. The parallelization degree of processes depends on the dependencies between these processes. Therefore, the dependency between processes is defined and quantified. Processes are parallelized according to the result of the dependency calculation. Related concepts, methods and possible results are described in detail. An example is given about a home appliance product design processes to explain how the method works. The result shows that, with SE and CE, industry can reduce its product throughput time. The result depends also on how processes are modeled and how Concurrent Engineering is achieved.