A framework for integration of production management issues and concurrent engineering

Abstract

Concurrent engineering (CE) has been mainly concerned with the integration of product and process design, while very little attention has been given to production management (PM) issues. In this paper the impact of the design stage on PM is highlighted and some of the possible improvements in considering also PM's issues at the design level are presented. One of the main problems in integrating design and PM is that design engineers and production managers speak two different languages, face different problems and use different tools. Typically, a designer deals with dimensions, tolerances and features, whereas the production manager is concerned with workloads, capacity, inventory, set-ups, lead times and due dates. In order to integrate design and PM, it is necessary to build models and tools to help the team to understand the impact of different design solutions on production management. This can be done in two main ways: (1) stating design rules; and (2) developing what-if models. A mathematical what-if model to set tolerances concurrently, choose processes and take into consideration capacity constraints, is proposed. Finally, an illustrative example of the use of the what-if mathematical model is given

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Notes on contributors

NANUA SINGH

e-mail: [email protected].