Collaborative engineering: A case study of concurrent engineering in a wider context

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is considered to be important for any engineering company wishing to survive in the present market. The continuing market pressure for reducing costs, improving quality and reducing time to market throughout the product life cycle is threatening engineering companies. CE has many aspects and is more a management and engineering philosophy to conquer the market pressure than a tool. Recent implementation efforts revealed that CE alone can not lead to maximum benefits. Therefore Collaborative Engineering (CE II) is introduced, placing CE in a wider context. This wider context is not obtainable from recent publications, they only show one side of CE. This one sided view in the literature leads to sub-optimization and misinterpretation. Based on 200 recent publications, the development, goals, and dimensions of CE are outlined. Furthermore, implementation efforts, as well as a view to indicate the most likely future developments are presented. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.