What is Concurrent Engineering?

The idea of Concurrent Engineering, the simultaneous development of products, is based on the idea, that many stakeholders are involved early. If the whole swarm-intelligence contributes in parallel, there are less late and expensive design changes. The product is quicker ready, in higher quality.

How does this look like today?

When several groups are accessing simultaneously on a current version of a product, it may look like this:

The assembly X has two sub-assemblies, X.1 and X.2. Stakeholder A reserves for further design X.1, stakeholder B X.2. In a perfect (conventional) world you are guided by a PDM system, the mentioned sub-assemblies are checked out. Checkout means, A and B are only allowed to write access the reserved sub-assemblies and their parts. Due to performance issues, the assembly will be copied from the PDM archive to the local drive. A see changes from B only after the local copy is updated, and vice versa.

It is a dilemma, if A need to change something in X.2.1. This won't work, because a file can only be reserved once for write access. B must check in this part of his design area, then A can make after check-out the appropriate changes in X.2.1.

Long time I thought, this is Concurrent Engineering, simultaneous design. The parallelism is obviously restricted. It is not possible to work in parallel on the same entity, it is only possible to grant parallel view access. The immediate actuality of the local copy is not safe.

Essentially this is only a technology of controlled copy (best with PDM). With the technology of check-in and checkout the appearance of duplicates is avoided, the wolf file is domesticated by PDM.

Is this really parallel, synchronous, simultaneous, concurrent?.

The ideal world is shown in this picture. There is only one source of truth, which is accessed simultaneously by many stakeholders. They access read only or with write access, and they always see immediately the current state or get it for edit.

It is always good to have a look into other domains. The concept of teamwork connecting many sites is nothing new, it is a standard in software development since a long time.

Many CAD and PDM systems are developed in distributed in many time zones and all over the globe, e.g., in Boston (USA), Cambridge (UK) and Pune (India) in parallel. Agile project management and tools like GitHub from Microsoft or Git from Linus Thorwald, the father of Linux, are used to make this teamwork perfect. Technologies of branching and merging are state of the art in software development.

Many cooks do not produce a good soup; we say in Germany. In the domain of software development, this isn't true anymore. The chaos of distributed development with many stakeholders, from many sites, from all time zones works fine.

Obviously, waterfall-based project management methodology is not used there. Agile methods leverage teamwork and help to get the best out of the potential of a team in a defined time. In a competition of a team, the best ideas will be produced.

One tool, to reach this, is ?Design Thinking". The kernel is a sprint with five stages:

1. Understand
2. Sketch the Solution
3. Decide
4. Prototype
5. Test

There are many sources describing this concept, here one: https://www.gv.com/sprint/

Let's try a Design Sprint with a simple use case of our domain, product development.

The device to be optimized is a drill stand.

Step 1: What are the challenges with current design?

The problem: The drill plate is hurt often while drilling through. It is too early damaged and replacement is expensive.

Step 2:

Three designers get the task to sketch one or more solutions, to decide the best one and build a digital prototype in CAD and a physical prototype for deep validation.

Three independent proposals came on the table.

Variant 1 solves the issue with a long hole in the drilling Zone and proposes due to reduction of strength a stiffener at the foot of the drill stand.

Variant 2 proposes three holes in the problem area.

Variant 3 proposes an extra steel plate, which can be substituted, when damage is too much.

The project team decides, that the best solution is a unification of ideas of variant 1 and 3. This shall be prototyped and given to the client for test and validation.

Oh, in a traditional CAD system you have now three different independent file sets, assemblies with different parts!

In this simple design it is not a drama, it is remodeled quickly. But what if the design is complex?

There is a solution for that, here the proof of concept:

In Onshape, the Cloud based SaaS CAD & PDM Solution of PTC, Ralf Steck, Georg von Vietinghoff and me did the following.

Based on a version ?V1" three design branches resulted, we three, the project team, designed the described changes from different locations, Friedrichshafen, Cologne and Hamburg, in one common Onshape document.

Ralf: Three holes

Zsolt: Long Mole and stiffener

Georg: Extra plate with milled groove

The optimal features will be merged after the design sprint for prototyping with one single click in Onshape into one consistent design.

This works only, because Onshape is designed without compromises for the Cloud. There are no files, there is only one design database, which can be accessed from everywhere, at any time and from any authorized persons. Those who are interested in more details of the underlying Onshape architecture have a look into this article in LinkedIn, I published a time ago.

If all pull at the same time the same rope, the result of the efforts is better than passing the rope in the team from A to B to....

I once thought, we have reached already perfect Concurrent Engineering.

This proof of concept shows a new, very important piece for real simultaneous design, parallel working. Concurrent Engineering has a new definition.

The technology of real simultaneous engineering has its great value in creating complex new designs, like this nose landing gear of an airplane maker kit.

RyleyKarl from Darkaero describes in this LinkedIn article, how he used branching and merging while optimizing the landing gear.

The technology, this article talks about, is a revolution in CAD design and the ability to design really simultaneous and work out easily design alternatives in one database.

Concurrent Engineering is now real Simultaneous Engineering.

Source of the drill stand example: This example was given to me from Georg von Vietinghoff from INNEO Solutions. Thanks, Georg.