The key to concurrent engineering is design tools

The dream of concurrent engineering has been largely unfulfilled. We have made strides in a limited subset of concurrent practices, such as design and manufacturing, but have not been able to fully integrate all aspects of a products life cycle. We still essentially engineer the support package as an after-the-fact product and designers and manufacturers worry primarily about time-to-market. Yet it is clear that given some level of test capability requirement there are ways to reduce the cost of providing that test capability in the overall life-cycle. Test capability includes manufacture, product assurance and field service. Design for testability is a passive set of design rules applied to a design. A more robust approach would be a pro-active analysis of testability factors. Yet our tools are not capable of linking this pro-active approach to CAD representations. Recreating information is an expensive luxury we can no longer afford, yet standard formats for data representations are too numerous to use properly. Further, our CAD tools do not provide the slots and facets for data that can be developed over the product life cycle and introduced as value-added to the design representation