Concurrent engineering as defined by Broughton is “an attempt to optimize the design of the product and manufacturing process to achieve reduced lead times and improved quality and cost by the integration of design and manufacturing activities and by maximizing parallelism in working practices’’. Another definition by Winner et al is “Concurrent engineering is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of products and their related processes, including manufacture and support. This approach is intended to cause the developers, from the outset, to consider all elements of the product life cycle from conception through disposal, including quality, cost, schedule, and user requirements’’.
Within the last decade, response to change was one of the pressures facing manufacturers due to high competition and this required a presence of concurrent engineering. New materials, development in technology, innovation in products are involved in the used process. Quality and time are two of the most important elements people in the marketplace concentrate on. There is a pressure of completing the project with high quality with limit of time. To response to the demands of customers and in order to survive in the marketplace, it is very important to introduce concurrent engineering.
In the context of the construction industry, the above definition, can be modified thus: ‘‘Concurrent engineering attempts to optimize the design of the project and its construction process to achieve reduced lead times, and improved quality and cost by the integration of design, fabrication, construction and erection activities and by maximizing concurrency and collaboration in working practices’’.
Some of the aspects that shall be introduced in applying CE: * The need for proper analysis and establishment of customer requirements and specifications. * The need for improving