Concurrent Engineering is an evolving process that requires continuous improvement and refinement. It is well established as an approach to engineer product parts, however, the concept has a much broader application. Concurrent engineering is the simultaneous consideration of product and process downstream requirements by multidisciplinary teams.
Specialists from all disciplines, including reliability, maintainability, human factors, safety, logistics, business and management, whose expertise will eventually be represented in the product, have important contributions throughout the system life cycle.
Simply put, it is a business strategy which replaces the traditional product development process with one in which tasks are done in parallel and there is an early consideration for every aspect of a products development process.
This strategy focuses on the optimization and distribution of a firms assets in the design and development process to ensure effective, efficient and concurrent product development process to minimize duplicate or repeat effort and risk.
Concurrent Engineering is now widely accepted as an appropriate method for producing better products faster and for lower cost. Information sharing, conflict resolution and version management are three very important aspects of this process.
Using this business strategy, manufacturers will learn how they can electronically define their critical part attributes both purchased and manufactured, deliver inspection sampling plans to their vendors over the internet and manage the quality trends of each supplier. Paperless process planning allows entire work instructions with data collections to be imbedded directly onto drawings or solid models.
Manufacturers need information about inventory availability, machine uptime and down time, product cycle times, yield, waste, WIP and lot tracking and genealogy. They need information management tools in real time for continuous improvement and decision support, and Concurrent Engineering can help them achieve this.
Many leading manufacturers have made great strides in optimizing materials usage by implementing powerful supply chain applications, and thus streamlining their manufacturing and planning processes. This is largely because this strategy requires applications across all functions within the company to share and communicate information. Each application used in the product development process needs to be linked to the rest.
Thus, this strategy has enabled many organizations to improve their product development, production, and product support and customer relationships. The evidence suggests that when a Concurrent Engineering approach is appropriately designed and implemented, organizational performance improves significantly, resulting in lower cost, improved product quality, reduction in cycle time and time to market, and improved utilization and coordination of human resources.
What Is Re Engineering
Application re-engineering strategically re-engineers your legacy systems to a better and enhanced platform keeping pace with the latest technologies available in the market. Furthermore, it streamlines multiple applications existing in an organization with repeated functions. This helps save resources and time.
With help of application re-engineering, you also get the benefit of latest architecture with a pleasant and professional look and feel based on the kind of application you require. Application migration is a planned process where the core values of your legacy system is maintained in the contemporary version. You may get added speed, better maintenance, quality apart from competitive advantage.
Apart from these, application re-engineering also brings with it the flexibility to respond quickly. You also end up reducing the costs on the maintenance of the legacy systems. This ultimately leaves you free of hassles with time to concentrate on other business goals.
The application re-engineering needs vary. It could either be the increase of users to an application, absence of documentation or some other complex requirements to suit the processes.
Your concentration area could be servicing, consulting, web enabling, application integration or environment upgrading, re-engineering services are customized according to your needs and requirements. Equal importance is given to re-engineering as well as the architecture of the application. The increase in ROI is a major factor that decides the success of application re-engineering.
When you outsource application re-engineering project to efficient companies, they spend time to analyze and study your problem and prepare a list of requirements, suggesting efficient solutions in places where enhancements would be beneficial. The technologies to be used are finalized and the road map to up-gradation is outlined. The detailed strategy is sent to the client so that there is complete approval from both ends.
An experienced project manager is given the surcharge of the project. He ensures smooth communication with the personnel from the client's side throughout to avoid any gaps. Most agencies today adopt a flexibility and agility welcoming ideas and suggestions wherever there is scope for improvement for better output. Thorough testing is done to remove any existing bugs or bottlenecks. At times, training programs are also recommended to update the users with the application and its benefit. If required the IT company send their professionals to familiarize with the application.
Organizations are also offering services and consulting in other related areas like application migration, performance re-engineering, technology re-engineering, business re-engineering among others. With pools of talented resources available in the IT industry today, all the services are customized according specific requirements.
Re-engineering applications have helped enterprises globally in their growth rate. Efforts are made to create a user friendly application and if required support is provided even after the implementation of the application. Various kinds of services are available where IT companies take complete responsibility of the project to provide the desired results.
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Jerry Glynn has sinced written about articles on various topics from Mothers Day, Health and 401K. iBASEt is a leading provider of high-tech software solutions and services. Learn more about Solumina, its Concurrent Engineering software online.. Jerry Glynn's top article generates over 135000 views. Bookmark Jerry Glynn to your Favourites.
