Concurrent engineering for missile development

Defence Research and Development Laboratory (DRDL) Hyderabad, one of the R&D labs of the Ministry of Defence, Government of India, was entrusted with the responsibility of simultaneous development and production of four different missile systems. In the early 1980s, when the programme started, the concept of concurrent engineering was little known. However, in order to meet the programme objectives and environmental challenges, DRDL evolved a new approach with an appropriate organisational structure and management tools. These tools and techniques fall under the broad category of concurrent engineering. This paper brings out the environmental drivers which provided impetus for the organisation to go for a radically new approach - the concurrent engineering approach. With the help of three case studies, the paper also brings out how these practices were customised and implemented in different scenarios to develop and produce the systems with reduced development-to-production cycle time still meeting user requirements.