ABSTRACT
Discipline is a vital ingredient in concurrent engineering, particularly when the market or competitive levels change suddenly. In the personal computer industry, products that might be in the research and development arsenal waiting for the right moment include optical disk drives, parallel-processing nodes, Reduced Instruction Set Computers processors, graphics processors for input of images and ultra-rapid delivery to the screen, 486-based machines, and ultra-lightweight laptops. If sales have fallen sharply, then errors must have been made in the handling of Quality Function Deployment, or the customer’s preference has changed quickly – as happened in the energy crisis, when gas mileage suddenly began to sell cars. In practice, a combination of economics and market demand will tell the task force when they need to replace an existing model. The rhythm of an engineering department is often such that the engineering of the new program is starting as the old one finishes.
