ABSTRACT
In its report, the committee on consultancy of the French Sixth Plan defined 'engineering' as 'all of the essential mental activities needed to optimize investment in all its forms, in its choices, in the technical processes of its realization and in its management'.1 We could paraphrase by saying that what we mean by consultancy is a set of methods and organizational structures which allow relevant scientific, technical and economic knowledge to be gathered and converted into designs and instructions for the construction of specific (in our case industrial) projects. These designs and instructions should, so far as possible, be optimal, i.e. they should be the least cost and highest productivity solutions which are consistent with the external constraints of market, input availability and labour skills.
