ABSTRACT
The UK Government initiated reports such as the Latham Report (1994) and the Egan Report (1998) have recommended the improvement of the construction industry’s business performance. The need for greater co-ordination and integration within the industry has led to the adoption of various concepts from other industries. One of these, which offers major scope for effective co-ordination and integration within the industry, is Concurrent Engineering (CE) (Kamara et al., 2000). CE sometimes called simultaneous engineering or parallel engineering, has been defined in several ways by different authors. The most popular definition is that by Winner et al. (1988), who state that CE ‘. . . is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from conception through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements’. In the context of the construction industry, Evbuomwan and Anumba (1998) define CE as an ‘attempt to optimise the design of the project and its construction process to achieve reduced lead times, and improved quality and cost by the integration of design, fabrication, construction and erection activities and by maximising concurrency and collaboration in working practices’. This is in sharp contrast with the traditional approach to construction project delivery.
