The role of documentation in a concurrent engineering environment

Concurrent engineering is proving a valuable technique for reducing product development cycle time and costs. Engineering, purchasing, manufacturing, and customer service working together can identify problems early and avoid costly reworks. Documentation is an important part of the product development process, and can benefit from being part of the concurrent engineering environment. This paper examines the ways in which information can be shared among internal and external documents and how that information can be coordinated with other types of product information in the concurrent engineering process.