Application of concurrent engineering in manufacturing industry

Companies in either manufacturing or servicing have to be restructured or re-organised in order to overcome challenges of the 21st century in which customers are not only satisfied but also delighted. In this competitive environment, organisations should use a flexible, adaptive and responsive paradigm. Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a management philosophy and is not restricted to manufacturing companies only. It involves systematic and simultaneous approach in developing a product or process while bringing up all the people who need to be involved in the first place. Global competitive pressure has motivated many companies to change to a more rapid form of product development such as concurrent engineering (CE). By executing design in parallel, improvements occur in many areas such as communication, quality, production processes, cash flows, and profitability. Manufacturing enterprise today has become a matter of effective and efficient application of information technology and knowledge-based engineering. On the one hand, this will increase the competitiveness of a firm in terms of quickly meeting dynamic changes in the market. Concurrent engineering (CE) is undertaken to improve the product design process with the intention of improving organisation performance. The study presented in this paper conducted an analysis of existing solutions to the problem of concurrent optimisation of the design, and the process planning stages when a new product is developed is addressed. This paper describes an object-oriented manufacturing process information model in the Unified Modelling Language. The model comprises classes on the necessary manufacturing information, such as artefact, manufacturing activities, workpiece, manufacturing equipment, estimated cost and time, and manufacturing process sequences. The paper advocates for a simultaneous approach rather than the traditional sequential one.