Reflective concurrent engineering - 3rd generation CE

Abstract

As the changes in our society becomes more frequent and extensive and our customers' requirements get more diversified, a new framework of concurrent engineering is called for. If we pay our attention to hardware products, we realize that we have not paid enough attention to the fact that our customers would like to use our products more to their needs and to their own tastes. We have been not fully aware that our customers are very active and creative and they enjoy customizing our products. We have attached too much importance to our final product and have not considered enough how we can create life time value by supporting their customization. Software development affords a good example and we can use their continual prototyping approach in hardware development, too. But to make it possible, we have to develop another way of product realization, where our design starts from elements and combine them into a product. Such a cell- structured or network-structured product realization will provide a basis for the 3rd concurrent engineering. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.