Simultaneous Engineering

The shortening of both time to market und product life cycle in combination with an increase of cost pressure, demand a fast and flexible product development process. The idea of simultaneous engineering is to gain time by treating product, process and resources in parallel and thus discovering discrepancies faster and adjusting the necessary factors. In order to establish an efficient knowledge management a wiki platform, here acting as a social software, is introduced. It serves as a centre of navigation within the process chain and supports the communication between the subprojects. Content can be edited by any member of the research project and may be discussed and changed by others. Its fast and free implementation qualifies the wiki tool and offers a secure and easy to handle platform.

The product change is a natural component of the development process and arises in the framework of a continuous improvement and refinement of planning inevitably. Ideally a constant information gain in the process of planning leads to a revision and an alteration of existing acceptance and concepts. A special case of the change is described by the Product Change Propagation. A local products change reproduces itself global and leads to a number of subsequent product changes, which can be measured heavily. In the complex planning surrounding the effect of a product change can be mostly not promptly recognised and will have complex correction loops as a consequence. This paper offers, aligned to the process organisation, a system-oriented approach for the early identification of planning inconsistencies by subsequent product changes.