Concurrent engineering challenges for manufacturing

The author describes ICL´s approach to flexible manufacturing, set up to deal with a wide variety of electronic products simultaneously (rather than focused volume lines on a few selected products), which has allowed them to meet the demands of the new shorter timescales but only at the cost of more intensive manual effort. It has also emphasised the need to balance skilled resources in the manufacturing operations with a cheaper (hence smaller and less highly trained) workforce on the production lines. The very core of concurrent engineering-`fuzzy gates´ allowing parallel activities to occur-is itself the greatest challenge to the individuals from manufacturing who are involved in the cross functional teams