Prioritizing components of concurrent engineering programs to support new product development

For many organizations Concurrent Engineering (CE) has become an integral part of their New Product Development (NPD) practices. By focusing efforts on customer needs, multifunctional teams have routinely reported developing higher quality products faster, and with lower costs. Reviews of literature report improvements in reduced time‐to‐market, improved quality, reductions in engineering change notices, lower rework, and reduced costs. Many of these initial successes, however, have not been repeated in subsequent implementations. Further studies reviewing the initial organizations that made the transition to CE to support their NPD processes have found that many organizations could not provide specifics about continuing CE efforts. Not all CE programs are successful. A difficulty often voiced is that the CE effort did not have a clear focus, or understanding of what the process entailed. The goal of this research was to support organizations implementing CE in their NPD processes by identifying and prioritizing CE program components. Data on CE program components were collected through a literature review and focus group with CE practitioners who averaged 17 years experience in research and product development, primarily in aerospace, electronics, defense and communication. The components were then structured into a two‐tier hierarchy using an Affinity Diagram and used as the basis for surveying a larger group of product developers to determine the relative priority of these components. Data were analyzed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process to arrive at a prioritized list of components for a successful concurrent engineering program. Results of this research identified three primary components for CE programs, the most important being effective use of multifunctional teams, followed by a clearly defined and understood product development process, and the availability and effective use of technology. The relative importance of these criteria did vary with the respondent experience with CE but did not exhibit as much variance between industry, government and academic groups. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Syst Eng 3: 168–176, 1999