Towards a reference curriculum for education on Concurrent Engineering / Enterprising

Concurrent Engineering / Enterprising success relies on the ability of multidisciplinary teams and manufacturing enterprise networks to be able to communicate their requirements to each other effectively, and coordinate their simultaneous activities and their dependencies during the product development process. Concurrent strategies demand a huge amount of cooperation between individuals and/or organisations during the product development process, and collaboration technologies play a key role as the enablers of the interaction among product development teams and networked enterprises in distributed environments. As a result, engineers and manufacturing enterprises require new human and organisational competencies together with state-of-the-art collaboration tools to support competitive concurrent strategies as part of their daily work and business operation. This paper proposes a reference curriculum for teaching CEE principles at university level as an academic initiative to prepare and train future engineers for working in multidisciplinary and distributed teams and exploit collaboration technologies in order to provide tangible benefits to the Next Generation Manufacturing Enterprise in highly competitive environments. The reference curriculum presented is based on authors teaching and training experience as well as on a survey conducted to study the current work on teaching initiatives on CEE around the world.