A process for obtaining integrated engineering design

The process of integrated engineering design begins as early as the pre concept and concept phases of a development program and begins with the uniting of the engineering community. The nucleus of this effort is combining the knowledge and expertise of the design engineers, support engineers, manufacturing engineers, and product users into “integrated teamwork”. The team then applies a combined mixture of perspectives, needs and experiences to the system design. The primary goal is to design a usable, producible, supportable system to meet the use criteria/readiness objective. This is not a new concept and is generally accepted, but not always easily implemented. This paper outlines a process from which to start the implementation of an integrated design approach