Tape/Vol. 11: Concurrent Engineering Principles with Industrial Examples

Tape/Vol. 12: Concurrent Engineering and Engineering & Engineering/ Electronic Data Management (EDM)

Additional reading on Object Oriented Concurrent (hardware and software) Engineering: as a new development, view the free, electronically published R&D journal, ADAM with IT (Advanced Design And Manufacturing with Information Technology) at this web site, as well as enjoy the hotlinks to other web sites via ADAM's WebCorner; both just a click away...

Topics covered by Dr. Paul G Ranky in this program include the following:

• Concurrent Engineering Principles with industrial examples
• Communication How to improve communication with the customers and users?
• Multidisciplinary product design teams
• Simultaneous manufacturing and process design
• Supplier and subcontractor involvement; CE project management strategy and methods
• CE feasibility study
• Machine/system study details and management strategy
• Detailed design & design for manufacturing (DFM)
• Integration of design, production control, planning and manufacture
• Requirements analysis dataflow model
• Interactive team and/or individual exercises

When wieving this program, try to imagine that you are a member of the concurrent engineering team. As you can see, there are several different engineering, manufacturing, total quality, information technology/ computing science, marketing, management and other expertise represented in such teams.

• summarize the key principles of concurrent engineering, and
• how the discussed concepts and examples might relate to your own work...
• Focus on the engineering, computing and management aspects of concurrent/ simultaneous engineering as well as the integration of different disciplines for the purpose of collaboration between different stages and groups of people that influence integrated product/ process design and delivery..

Note the

• Major steps and the reasoning behind the decisions, as explained in the tape.
• Also note that these are generic models, therefore with minor modifications and/or customization probably could be used for helping your job too!
• Consider the kind of software support tools that you could design as part of a CE information technology team to support the discussed activities. (Always look for objects, classes of objects and processes that interact; as a lead...).

Engineering, computing and management students and professionals:

As you can see from the above discussion and diagrams, collaboration between engineers, IT and management professionals is crucial. As an interactive exercise try to customize these diagrams to support your own engineering, management and IT decisions. (As you can see these three major disciplines are integrated, therefore you should work on this with all 'three hats on' and/or in a team).

• First: identify the critical objects and their classes of objects,
• then describe the behavior of the identified objects, then
• describe the interactions between the objects.

Try to answer these questions: What activities and how would you support with these and other software tools?

summarize with examples the most important concurrent engineering principles.

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• summarize the key points,
• what you have learned in this tape, and
• how the discussed concepts and examples might relate to your own work in engineering, computing and management.

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Topics presented, with industrial examples, by Mr. Paul Francis, CEO, International CIM Consultants, include the following:

• Concurrent engineering & engineering/ electronic data management
• Competitive product and process pressures
• Teamwork in the product/ process development cycle
• Product design/manufacture knowledge base
• Capturing generic group practices and knowledge
• Simple and sophisticated EDM tools
• The company knowledge and the distributed database
• Interfacing versus integration
• Change management
• The process oriented versus hierarchically structured organisation
• The value chain oriented company - organisational issues of concurrent engineering
• Interactive team and/or individual exercises.

When wieving this program, try to imagine that you are a member of the concurrent engineering team. As you can see, there are several different engineering, manufacturing, total quality, information technology, marketing and other expertise represented in such teams.

Note, that in this networked (EDM) architecture, illustrated above, following the original DEC "S" curve principle, the lower layer classes of objects (and their processes) such as motors, sensors, actuators, relays and switches, and others are typically networked into a Fieldbus (or profibus) for fast, real-time networking. Then this network is linked to the factory intranet, which is then further linked to the Internet.

Also note, that such systems typically represent plenty of opportunities for engineering oriented IT professionals to improve operations by several fold (yes, you can save plenty $$$ !!!) as part of a good, supportive concurrent engineering team.

• summarize the key points,
• what you have learned of this tape, and
• how the discussed concepts and examples might relate to your own work...
• As an advanced exercise consider that every component/ object, or device in this model/ system could be interpreted as a web-page. (This means that every machine, conveyor, robot, tool, cell controller and others could be represented and communicated with as a web-page!) This client-server architecture is important since the web is a widely used, low cost and extremely robust system. Following this thought process, try to identify the critical attributes of these individual, then networked web-pages. (This will be crucial when establishing digital factory communication systems over the web using XML).

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