Concurrent Engineering in industry and Civil Engineering

Satisfying the increasing market demands requires organisations to change the organisation of their processes and the technologies to support those processes. In industry the concept of Concurrent Engineering is viewed as an approach to achieve satisfactory performance. Achieving alignment between processes, people and means, and organisational arrangements through integration and parallellisation is the main focus of this approach. In industry, the attention has gradually shifted from production to (the earlier phases of) the design process including the marketing process. Although implementation of Concurrent Engineering including the alignment with suppliers still presents many problems, there is basic agreement on the directions to follow. In Civil Engineering the situation is quite different In this paper these differences are discussed as well as their causes. Developments that can be observed in practice to solve the performance problems will be identified.