Accelerating the engineering to manufacturing transition

With today's ever increasing pressures for bringing new products to market in ever shorter periods of time, companies may neglect to consider some of the key product design attributes-often called the "-ilities"-that affect the manufacturing process. When this happens, time to market is often extended because of the need for product redesign in order to improve manufacturing yields and quality or to lower product costs. One of the ways to reduce the number of product design iterations, or post-prototype engineering changes, is to design both the product and the manufacturing processes simultaneously. This requires involving all of the organization's pertinent engineering disciplines, in addition to marketing and support functions, right from the start of the project. This type of team development activity is usually referred to as concurrent engineering (CE) or integrated product development (IPD).>