Supporting R&M in a concurrent engineering environment

This paper illustrates how the DICE concurrent engineering environment supports a remote, interdisciplinary team in cooperative decision-making during all phases of product development. The objectives of this environment are to enable government and industry to manage complexity and to improve continuously the total quality of their products, systems, and services, and customer satisfaction. Each discipline in the development team is remotely interfaced to all others and to a full range of shared services through networked computer workstations. In particular, the R&M discipline is supported as an equal member of the product-development team by means of the logistics workstation and selected computer-aided tools integrated with it. A logistics process tool, which identifies links between design, manufacturing and logistics disciplines, is described along with a toolbox of supporting analysis and evaluation methods. The principal barriers to the acceptance of concurrent engineering are institutional and cultural. We conclude with a plan for resolving these barriers by training, education, and selected application of technologies for organizational modeling and supported communications