Concurrent engineering for consumer, industrial products, and government systems

Since the early days of consumer solid-state electronics products, Japanese companies have used a team-oriented integrated product/process development process to dominate the development of new multidisciplinary electronic, mechatronic, and other sophisticated technology products. The power of this dynamic project management methodology is now behind all major new product development, including telecommunications, automobiles, aircraft, computers, etc. It has begun to be adopted by many industries and businesses in the US and the rest of the world. This integrated team multidisciplinary dynamic project management development process is known as concurrent engineering (CE). Recent Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) reports, NSF workshops, and other current efforts and publications addressing CE are reviewed and their findings are discussed in detail