Acquisition and Logistics

Acquisition and Logistics

Introduction

A recent innovation in the field of Acquisition and Logistics is CE (Concurrent Engineering), an innovative method for integrated product development pioneered by United States Department of Defense (DoD) for US defense industry. Owing to its remarkable results, commercial industries all over the world are now using it to gain a competitive edge over their competitors. Concurrent Engineering can be successfully applied to any manufacturing firm and provide them with required results in a short period of time, dependent on the life-cycle of designing, developing, testing and launching a product. Application of Concurrent Engineering can take place in the areas such as electronic systems, information exchange, mechanical systems, reliability and maintainability, software, technical administration and manufacturing. This assignment is focused on the application of concurrent engineering in acquisition and logistics so we will focus on acquisition and logistic area only. This assignment has explored specifically how concurrent engineering can be beneficial for organizations if applied in the area of acquisition and logistics and can result in momentous achievements for organizations.

Discussion

Work methodology of Concept Engineering is based in tasks parallelization which means performing several tasks concurrently. CE is heavily used in product development in which several functions such as manufacturing engineering, design engineering etc. are integrated for the reduction of elapsed time that product development life-cycle requires from idea conception to introduction to the market. The basic idea for concurrent engineering is based on two concepts. The first concept is about all the elements in product's life-cycle, from producibility, functionality, assembly, maintenance issues, environment impact, testability and final recycling and disposal that must be taken into consideration in the early phases of product design (Blanchard, 2000).

Traditionally, concept of concurrent engineering applied only in manufacturing operations for parallelization of tasks such as product design, product development etc. to make operations more efficient. Organizations carry out manufacturing operations on their own without any direct involvement of outside forces (suppliers for example). But given the increasingly fierce competition in local as well as global markets, organizations need to produce world-class products at lowest possible cost to stay ahead of their competitors. But producing world-class products requires organizations not only make their processes/systems world class, but also those of their partners in their supply chain. In the initial stages of design process, CE includes and considers various design attributes in a product such as durability, aesthetics, ergonomics, logistics, interchangeability, maintainability, manufacturability, marketability, safety, reliability, procurability, transportability etc. Number of studies has shown that effective logistics design contributes in the improvement of other functional areas that are involved in product design. Acquisition and logistics activities touch upon the area of product design as the personification of all the future activities. Just like logistics design affects other functional areas, those functional areas also affect the logistics considerations (Kusiak, 2000).

Implementation of Concurrent Engineering Acquisition and logistics framework for product design

Concurrent Engineering in Acquisition and Logistics essentially include the functional requirement of designer as well s Acquisition and logistics requirements of supportability, availability, quality, cost, timely ...