Managing concurrent engineering with early supplier involvement: a case study

Abstract

Concurrent engineering (CE) works best when designers share information early during product development. This information can be incomplete or contradictory. Information sharing is even more important when it crosses company borders to include customers and suppliers in the development of complex products. This applied research focuses on CE with early supplier involvement (ESI). A review of CE and ESI related literature finds a lack of efforts that address the two issues of structuring the process of customer-supplier collaboration, and placing the supplier in the customer's engineering process. This paper reports the findings of a case study addressing these issues conducted within two European companies (customer and supplier). This test uncovered difficulties in implementing CE across company borders. It also found that document processing, the most common coordination method, does not capture the engineers' view of their work. Rather, engineers view their work in terms of assigning values to specifications and describing the relationships among specifications. This view is well supported by parameters. The resulting parameter approach is useful in allowing information sharing, data communication, and in controlling data validity. This paper discusses these findings as well as implications relevant to those seeking to incorporate knowledge available from suppliers into the engineering design process.

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