Simultaneous engineering

Simultaneous engineering is a product development strategy that shortens development time and can help avoid production-related modifications further down the line. The aim is to improve coordination between engineering and production.

The fundamental principle is to overlap Work steps that would normally be conducted one after the other. The next step in line starts in parallel with the one before it as soon as sufficient information is available from the first. The disadvantage to this strategy is that it can lead to more work, since those involved are not working with finalised information from the previous step and the basis of their work could still change. The advantage, however, is that faults are identified much sooner, which can save substantial costs in subsequent production stages.

Simultaneous engineering differs from traditional product and production planning, which maintains a strict separation between the development, Design and finalisation of products and the planning of production.