Managing concurrent engineering across company borders: a case study

Concurrent engineering (CE) requires designers to share information that can be incomplete or contradictory early during product development (PD). Information share is even more important when it crosses company borders to include customers and suppliers in the development of complex product. This exploratory research focuses on CE during early supplier involvement (ESI) when the product development process involves more than one company. A review of CE and ESI related literature finds lacking efforts that address the two issues: how to structure the process of customer/supplier collaboration, and where the supplier is involved in the customer´ engineering process. This paper reports the findings of a case study conducted within two European companies (customer/supplier) about the issues. This paper found: (a) difficulties to implement CE across company borders; (b) engineers tend not to view their work in terms of creating and altering documents, nor even in terms of processes but in terms of assigning values to specifications and the relationships among specifications. This view is well supported by parameters. This parameter approach is useful to allow information-sharing, data communication and to control data validity. The paper discusses those findings as well as the implications relevant to those seeking to incorporate the information knowledge available from suppliers into the engineering design process. But it is neither aimed to justify the obtained results nor to describe any existing model that may help to understand such results.