Concurrent Engineering Approaches within Product Development Processes for Managing Production Start-up phase

Abstract: Nowadays in a turbulent market, developing and launching a new product is one of most competitive strategies implemented by many large and small enterprises. In fact, launching a new product depends upon the performance of four critical functions: design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing. Their performances would increase or decrease the total time-to-market and consequently time-to-money. Time-to-market would be improved if the manufacturing system can diminish time-to-volume/quality/cost during production start-up phase. In order to overcome the impediment during a start-up phase, the significant parameters which are influencing a production start-up phase should be identified and managed. Hence, a system-wide approach would facilitate a product realization process so as to achieve global optimization throughout the entire process. One of such systems is Concurrent Engineering which can be applied owing to being enable to choose the best practice to improve product introduction process, being capable to improve cross functional integration and communication, and being empowered to apply a set of comprehensive methods for design analysis so that designers can select the most optimal design solution which is not only considering the design constraints, but also taking the constraints of production system, logistics and distribution into account. Hence, it can cover majority of problems in start-up phase which are generated due to lack of empathy between design and manufacturing. This research studied the significant parameters influencing a production start-up phase. Then, it investigated whether the principle of concurrent engineering would support an efficient start-up phase. The selected research methodology is based on a conceptual and supportive literature review of the current scholars. The research design is according to a three-step process which is applied to catch most relevant literatures. The research implements an analogy reasoning logic to establish the outcome of the research through the comparison between principles of a concurrent engineering program and significant parameters. As a result of the research, the significant parameters are identified, in addition, a managerial framework is structured that can present the requirements to manage an efficient start-up phase. Moreover, the results indicate how a concurrent engineering program would support a start-up phase.