Systems engineering and concurrent engineering: synonymous, complementary or contrary?

Systems engineering emerged as the need to manage complexity in the development of large scale systems became pressing. Concurrent engineering was defined less than ten years ago and has commonly been adopted to address the need for development time scale reduction. Definitions of both systems engineering and concurrent engineering may lead an observer to conclude that they occupy the same territory and could even be synonymous. Textbooks and collections of papers under the two headings cover many of the same tools, perhaps confirming that observer´s view. But a difference in the focus of systems engineering and concurrent engineering marks out their respective territories quite sharply. A less superficial observer might come to a realisation that a fully-empowered concurrent engineering team is unlikely to conform to the highly structured hierarchical systems engineering process that is proposed to engineer large systems. The two approaches appear quite contrary, instead. Both forms of engineering have the same objective in developing and introducing new products. Either their two domains (project size? technologies? market characteristics?) might be recognised and charted, or a synthesis might be attempted. The two approaches may be complementary