Managing Concurrent Engineering In Malaysian Small Medium Enterprises

Both liberalization and open market borderless trading has globalized the world in many ways bringing about changes and benefits to developing and developed countries alike. In this rapidly changing global economy, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) has always and will always be contributors to the national and world economic growing needs. This is research (is) based on the overall evaluation of the level of usage of concurrent engineering (CE) in Malaysian SMEs. The evaluation was carried out by sending the questionnaire to the appropriate SMEs. The survey results were gathered and transformed into graphs, followed by a discussion in order to provide a detailed and comprehensive explanation. From the survey conducted it was found that most of the Malaysian SMEs were working in line with the concept of CE in new product development process, although they did not understand what CE was all about. It can now be concluded that, this concept is new in Malaysian SMEs. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.