Concurrent engineering (CE) is also called simultaneous engineering. CE is a method of designing and developing products where the designs at different stages are performed simultaneously rather than consecutively and where the functions of design engineering, manufacturing engineering, and other functions are integrated to reduce the time required to decrease product development time, improve productivity, and reduce manufacturing costs. CE is in contrast to conventional sequential engineering design where design activities are performed in a sequential way.

In recent times, enterprises are facing a time competition concurrence. Any enterprise which in the shortest possible time can deliver products which meet customers requirements can win many competitive advantages. Three dimensional concurrent engineering is an operation management method based on time competition. It expands concurrent engineering to the supply chain design and improves the operating performances. When elaborating the tradition house of quality there are some defects which occur. This paper proposes a quality functional deployment of three dimensional concurrent engineering by introducing an extended quality functional deployment. Through an extend house of quality, this research transforms customer requirements into product design, the process design and the supply chain design and reduces the time from new product design to product market. It then combines the Extend Quality Function Deployment with the three dimensional concurrent engineering in order to resolve the defects met when elaborating the tradition house of quality. This way, this research helps to satisfy the customer requirements, to improve product quality, to shorten the development cycle of product, to enhance customer response speed and to increase the competition capability of enterprises.

Producibility engineering is a coordinative discipline with the design function of the industrial organization. Through this coordinative approach we strive to optimize the process of producing the company's products. We cannot, however, simply isolate the manufacturing engineering subset called producibility engineering and discuss it and its techniques without introducing the concept of concurrent engineering (sometimes referred to as design for manufacturability). The work of a producibility engineer is in many aspects an inter-functional one. It deals with finding the pragmatic limits of feasibility for manufacturing and still meeting the intent of the design. In this case, the relationship is between manufacturing engineering and design engineering. When we expand beyond the manufacturing and design engineering relationship to include the entire industrial organization, we enter the domain of concurrent engineering. The concurrent engineering concept unites all functions of a company into a team for conceiving, designing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing a product in an integrated and optimal approach. Just as the name suggests, all this work is done in a concurrent approach. Producibility engineering is at the same time a root of the concurrent engineering philosophy and a subset of it, as a member of the concurrent engineering team. Therefore, in this chapter we explore producibility engineering as a prelude to and within the concurrent engineering concept. We will see how producibility engineering techniques are used in this unifying concept. In this chapter we define the concurrent engineering role in modern manufacturing and then focus on the producibility engineering aspects of that role. We look at the techniques in which producibility engineering leads the concurrent engineering team, and also identify areas where producibility engineering assists other functions.

Basic concurrent engineering has received much attention and application since about 1980, and the attention given it has intensified since about 1988. It makes a strong start on overcoming some of the 10 cash drains and has been a major element of many leading companies' improved competitiveness. Basic concurrent engineering has two essential characteristics: (1) it is a concurrent process, and (2) it is carried out by a multifunctional product development team (PDT). Product design, production-process engineering, field-support development, and all other elements of product success are addressed from the beginning as an integrated set of activities and objectives. The ideal is simple: to have one team working on one system in one total development activity, all focused on benefit to the customer. The system is the product, the production capability, and the field-support capability. The design parameters, production parameters, and field-support parameters all integrated together define the unified system. It is the responsibility of the PDT to define and quantify all of the parameters in one total development activity.

Global competitiveness requires vigilant information processing that goes beyond basic concurrent engineering. A complex product requires millions of decisions to carry it into production and into the marketplace. The development program starts with broad goals, which are then focused by customer needs. Decision making in total quality development has five improvements over the traditional process: • Team decisions (utilize collective experience, and develop commitment) • Visual, connective methods, usually employing large displays on paper (focus team, and reveal interrelationships in data) • Customer focus • Optimization of critical decisions • Problem prevention There is a hierarchy of decisions. Individuals make most product development decisions, on the basis of experience—their own and others'. For decision makers, the body of available experience includes analyses, the most concise records of experience. It also includes handbooks, computerized records, and other repositories of experience. In developing a complex product, there may be 10 million decisions; most of them are within the grasp of individuals equipped with these tools. Although individuals can make most decisions, the most critical decisions (roughly 1000 to 10,000 for large, complex products) require more attention, and most of them do not lie entirely within the experience or group of any individual. However, collective experience properly concentrated is sufficient. The right multifunctional team using a disciplined approach can make good decisions. The primary approach for these decisions is quality function deployment (QFD; Hauser and Clausing, 1988), now expanded into enhanced QFD (EQFD; Clausing and Pugh, 1991). Still fewer decisions, typically several hundred for a large, complex product, are truly critical and cannot be made successfully on the basis of even the collective team experience. These decisions must be arrived at by systematic optimization. The process that has been found most broadly useful in total development work is Dr. Genichi Taguchi's system of quality engineering using robust design (Taguchi and Clausing, 1990; Phadke, 1989). This process also often uses teams, and EQFD can be effectively used to lead into Taguchi's optimization system.