Development of a Concurrent Engineering Handbook using Intranet technology

The space systems business, along with many others in the manufacturing sector, has necessarily been forced to drastically reduce the time to market for its products. One of the many organisational responses to this imperative has been to adopt a concurrent engineering (CE) approach. This paper describes some collaborative work between the Systems Engineering Group (SEG) at De Montfort University and the UK Manufacturing Operations Directorate (DOUK) of MMS. The work entails the development of a prototypical multimedia communications package to support a CE culture within DOUK. The package is referred to as the Concurrent Engineering Handbook (CEH). The CEH was originally hosted on a hypertext environment known as FrameMaker^TM, but later changed to Netscape^TM, because its documents were portable, easier to manage and distribute on a network of computer sites. These capabilities were exploited to not only educate users about company processes, but to aid the CE approach. This paper gives an overview of CE and why it is used, as well as highlighting some of the problems encountered when companies adopt this approach. A description of the CEH´s architecture is presented, and how it attempts to address the problems of implementing CE. The architecture of the CEH provides an insight into how the information is arranged on disk, and features of the page design which will facilitate page reuse