ABSTRACT
Senior managers need to keep their fingers on the pulse of their company and to anticipate the directions in which concurrent engineering (CE) is taking them, and where they wish to guide it. In most companies there will be a regrouping of the main departments, with product design and manufacturing engineering coming under the control of one vice president. Once a company adopts concurrent engineering wholeheartedly, its culture must and will change. There are several dangers in the implementation of CE. With an unimaginative approach, design could become too formal, relying heavily on standards and specific techniques and not enough on the imagination of designers. Confidentiality of data is always a cause for concern, and the transmission of proprietary data between departments and to vendors requires considerable attention to security, with the use of passwords, ID cards, and encryption for external transmissions.
