Concurrent engineering: A competitive strategy for process industries

Concurrent Engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to the integrated, simultaneous design of both products and their related processes, including production. A number of research reports are available in the literature to deal with CE and its applications in manufacturing industries. However, the application of CE in Process Industries (PI) has not received enough attention from researchers and practitioners for improving productivity and quality. To use CE effectively in process industries requires accuracy of data and a common architecture. In PI, the products are processed with minimal interruptions in any one production run or between production runs of products that exhibit process characteristics, such as liquids, fibres, powders and gases. The general characteristics of this industry add value to materials by mixing, separating, forming, or chemical reactions. PI often initiate their flow with only a few raw materials and subsequently process a variety of blending and resplitting operations. Nevertheless, there are many common characteristics such as material and information flow between manufacturing and PI. This indicates the application areas of CE in PI and hence to improve the competitiveness of PI in terms of flexibility and responsiveness. An attempt has been made in this paper to study how CE can be utilized to design products, production system, and production planning and control (PPC) system for improving productivity and quality in PI.