THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF CONCURRENT ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTALS

This paper explores the history of the ideas behind concurrent enginee ring from the end of the 19th century until the 1960's, Concurrent eng ineering is the relatively recent term that is applied to the engineer ing design philosophy of crossfunctional cooperation in order to creat e products that are better, cheaper, and more quickly brought to marke t. The principles of concurrent engineering that are traced by this pa per are: manufacturing and functional design constraints need to be co nsidered simultaneously; combining of people with different functional backgrounds into a design team is a useful way to combine the differe nt knowledge bases; engineering designers must bear in mind customer p references during the design process; and time to market is an importa nt determinant of eventual success in the market. None of these princi ples is by itself surprising; concurrent engineering has led to their propagation to many people and firms in the engineering world, The aut hor has examined the engineering literature in order to locate the exi stence of similar themes in published engineering thought, All of thes e themes have recurred often in the literature, Concurrent engineering can be seen therefore as a summary of best practice in product develo pment, rather than the adoption of a radically new set of ideas. The p aper suggests some reasons that concurrent engineering ideas may not h ave been adopted more widely,