Concurrent Engineering - Essay Example

The rapid growth and expansion of various organizations into different parts of the world has made it necessary for organizations to form a reliable process that supplies raw materials to the company and distributes the finished products to the vendors all over the world. Another major factor is the impact supply chain management has had on customer service. Supply chain management ensures that the right amount of a certain product is made available to the customer at the right time. In addition proper supply chain management also ensures that the product is where the customer expects it to be.

Other than that supply chain management help Company’s cut down on costs by cutting down the use of assets such as warehouses, transport and manufacturing plants (Mentzer et al., 2001). According to La Londe and Masters (1994), supply chain management is a process in which different companies provide raw materials. Multiple organizations use those raw materials to manufacture a product and placing that product in the hands of the customer. Wholesalers, transportation, raw material, producers and assemblers all fall under the category of supply chain management (La Londe & Masters, 1994).

Concurrent Engineering: Concurrent engineering is a type of work approach where different processes and tasks are carried out at the same time. The main aim of concurrent engineering is to reduce the time it takes to manufacture and distribute a product. Concurrent engineering in the recent past has experienced a number of changes. With each change companies have tried to refine and shape the processes of concurrent engineering to suit their needs (Ma et al., 2008). It is for this reason that concurrent engineering has gained a lot of popularity amongst different organizations.

Concurrent engineering is based on two main concepts. The first concept states that the nature and lifespan of all the resources being used must be taken into account during the design phase. The lifespan or the lifecycle of all the resources can vary in amount and in type. Information regarding any resources can be qualitative or quantitative and can be sometimes very difficult to manage. The variation in volume and type causes different designers to focus on a particular subject or a particular domain of the product being manufactured the rest of the information is either ignored or is handed over to someone else to ponder over.

Second concept revolves around the fact that the later stages of design phase must be carried out simultaneously that is concurrently. Any errors would be discovered early on in the design phase and would be rectified without any significant delay and without any trouble. Early detection of these errors also reduces the number of costly mistakes that the company can encounter in the latter stages of production. In 2006, a study showed that concurrent design process can help organizations save large amounts of money (Quan & Jianmin, 2006).

Concurrent engineering is opposite to the traditional and sequential waterfall method. Waterfall method moves in a sequence with the sequence already defined. Any mistakes within the waterfall method could lead to the heavy alteration in the design which eventually leads to wastage of time. Concurrent Engineering in Supply Chain Management In the last decade, various organizations and governments have made a lot of effort within framework of research and development of concurrent eng