This paper reports the findings from a two-phased empirical study of concurrent engineering (CE) as an emerging approach for managing product development. The first phase of the research re-examined 11 exemplary cases of CE implementation in a set of leading U.S. firms and synthesized the critical components of CE (Lee, 1992; 1993). Based on the organizational model developed, the second phase of this research investigated the adoption of CE practices in two selected U.S. industries, small household appliances (SIC codes 3631-9) and process control instrument (SIC code 3823), and examined its relationship with product development performance. Data were obtained through a mailed survey to the product development engineers and managers in these two industries.
Overall the results indicate that CE is gaining wide spread acceptance in industry and seems to have positive impacts on all major aspects of product development performance. It appears that, if effectively implemented, CE can bring about multiple, synergistic benefits without necessarily sacrificing one performance goal for the other. The adoption of CE was found to be beneficial across a broad range of products with different characteristics or different market structures. The results were consistent across the two different industries.
The implementation of CE was found to be associated with the adoption of a variety of engineering and management innovations. These innovations and practices appeared to provide the necessary stimulus for organizational changes and companies appeared to adopt a "cocktail" of these innovations when implementing CE to achieve a higher organizational goal. Statistically, the impact on product development performance was attributed to the adoption of CE, but not to any of the individual innovations.
Organizations that adopted CE also used significantly more computer technologies in design, in manufacturing, as well as the integration of design with manufacturing. However, there was no evidence that the use of these computer technologies improved performance in any way.
The adoption of CE was related to organizational structure and cross-functional communication. But the multi-functional team appeared to be the only organizational structure that had been used extensively and successfully for promoting CE. The adoption of CE was significantly correlated with the perceived quality of cross-functional communication, but not to the frequency exchange.
Overall the results suggest that CE is emerging as a very promising approach for product development but there are also signs that question its long-term viability. In particular, there is little evidence to show that CE is successful beyond the project team level and there appears to be a general lack of effective reward or incentive systems in organizations to promote the long-term success of CE.
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