IMPROVING THE BUSINESS

Improving the business

Improving the business

Statement

No engineering business can remain competitive by staying as it is. It must constantly improve all it does.

Introduction

In most enterprises, a critical dimension of competition is the speed of an enterprise in responding to customer demands. Therefore, having real-time information delivered between internal departments and external business partners is a vital advantage for management in undertaking any important decision making (Ohno, 2008). Many researchers have looked into this aspect in manufacturing environments where fast response to product manufacture often relates to the term concurrent engineering (CE).

CE has also been referred to as simultaneous engineering (Ogawa, 2006), life-cycle engineering, concurrent product and process design, design for production, design for manufacture and assembly (Linge, 2007), integrated and cooperative design, design fusion, producibility ]engineering, and system engineering. Whatever it is called, CE is not a physical process or a set of procedures; it is a board-level responsibility to integrate the concept into effective, cohesive business units (Liker, 2006).

Discussion

Rolls-Royce defines SE/CE in terms of the objective rather than the process (Gertler, 2006) as an approach to optimize the design of the product and the manufacturing process to achieve reduced lead times and improved quality and reduced cost by the integration of design and manufacturing activities and by maximizing parallelism in working practices. These definitions indicate that the lead time should be significantly reduced as a result of CE.

The idea behind CE is acknowledged as a concept that integrates all the departments within an enterprise. The competitiveness between supplier and customer partly relies on how effectively and efficiently the parties in the supply-chain handle the order and information. This can be assisted by the use of an integrated, enterprisewide information system such as an ERP system. (Flynn, 2005) highlighted that ERP-type systems will provide precise information and better performance in manufacturing and logistics.

The Recovery Situation

The analysis of the recovery situation is considerably more complicated than that of consumables. Normally, in a recovery situation some items cannot be recovered, so the number of units demanded is not balanced completely by the return of reusable units. Thus, in addition to recovered units, a firm must also purchase some new units from time to time. Consequently, even at a single location, there are five decision variables: (1) how often to review the stock status, (2) when to recover returned units, (3) how many to recover at a time, (4) when to order new units, and (5) how many to order. When there are multiple locations, the firm must decide how many good units to deploy to a central warehouse and how many to deploy to each retailer or field-stocking location (Bowersox, 2008).

Product Design and New Product Introduction

The product design and new product introduction category deals with design issues for mass customization, delayed differentiation, modularity, and other issues for new product introduction. With the increasing supply-chain demands of product variety and customization, there is an increasing body of research available. One of the most exciting applications of “supply-chain thinking” is the increased use ...