Advantages of office automation application in concurrent engineering environment

Summary form only given. The transformation of the “Sellers Market” of the 1980s to “Buyers Market” of the 1990s, created an extremely competitive marketing environment, in which the definition of time to market became crucial. In other words, the first to introduce a new and attractive product, will enjoy the major share of the potential profits. In order to survive in such an environment, the world´s industrial establishments have modified their internal strategies and organizational structures, to shorten the interdisciplinary lead times. The new challenges, encountered with a great success by many industries and especially by hi-tech giants, emphasise the advantages of various team-work oriented methods, such as JIT and concurrent engineering. The PC revolution accelerated the creation of groupware orientation, to overcome the historical barriers between various organizational disciplines. Within the frame of this revolution, even the traditional office organization, based on a “boss”, his secretary and a typist, has been forced to contribute to the main effort. Real time transfer of documents between the computer network users, filing as well as recovery of technical documentation, became a public domain. The groupware software packages, such as word processing, computerized graphics, E-mail, task control, electronic files etc., became a user-friendly tool, easily accessible by everybody in the organization. This paper presents the advantages of office computerization in a hi-tech company, acting in a concurrent engineering environment