How to Perform Simultaneous Process Engineering

The use of innovation to achieve a competitive advantage is not new. What is of current interest is how some manufacturing organizations have used the speed of product innovation to gain competitive edge. To implement such a competitive strategy effectively, many firms have applied the technique of simultaneous engineering. The most common subject of previously published research on simultaneous engineering has been its application to product innovation. The article focuses on simultaneous process engineering. It explains how the principles of quality function deployment, which are used for product design, can be applied to manufacturing process design. It details the lessons learned from adopting such an approach for simultaneous process design.