Balancing concurrent engineering environmental factors for improved product development performance

Global competitive pressure has motivated many companies to change to a more rapid form of product development such as concurrent engineering (CE). Researchers have shown that without establishing the appropriate environments for CE, companies may fail to achieve all the benefits of using CE as a product development process. The primary purposes of this study were to determine: the relationships between a select group of environmental factors that contribute to a successful CE program, and the effects of a balanced approach among the factors on performance. This research design for this study is based on two case studies and a survey of product development managers. Data and information gathered from the case studies and the survey are used in ANOVA statistical procedures to examine the relationship between CE environmental factors and product development performance. Among other things, the results of this study show that CE factors such as the size of the project are less important than balancing the resources (i.e. technology and human) of the organization.