The change to simultaneous engineering

Describes the changes which have taken place, at the Fordhouses Wolverhampton site of Lucas Aerospace, since the late 1980´s. The business provides flight control systems for a wide range of aircraft types in both the military and civil markets. The predicted decline of the military market and a relatively high cost base of the business, amplified the need for a radical change. A small executive level team (known as the Business Development Group) worked together, on a full time basis, for a period of 2 months in order to determine the overall organisational strategy for the business. This group laid the foundation for a number of major changes ranging from the introduction of product based manufacturing cells, operator self inspection and the introduction of a multi-disciplinary project team structure for product introduction. This paper focuses on changes to the product introduction process at the Fordhouses site