Concurrent engineering in small companies

Evaluation of Quality Concepts Influencing a Manufacturing Environment in South Africa

“…The strategic importance of the research is closely linked to the work of Fynes and Búrca [9] in Ireland and Starbek and Grum [8] in Slovenia, who set out to establish the level of quality knowledge, and specifically concepts such as Quality Function Deployment and Concurrent Engineering, in their respective countries. This current research is seen to be important because of the information it hopes to establish through a case study in a South African environment.…”

“…Others have linked the concept to processorientated technological terms such as Design for Manufacturability (DFM), design for producibility, design for reliability, design for serviceability, and so on, until Gatenby and Foo coined the term 'Design for X' (DFX) where the X stands for all of the above '-ilities'. Starbek and Grum [8] proposed to implement concurrent engineering into small companies, but found that one such company did not possess all the tools required for concurrent engineering support; so the company management decided that the established teams should first implement quality function deployment (QFD).…”

Ingeniería Concurrente Aplicada Al Sector Del Calzado. Caso Práctico

“…Las empresas que se adapten a las nuevas condiciones del mercado lograrán su permanencia [14] y al crecer en proyección internacional se encontrarán con varias dificultades, como, por ejemplo, los excesivos tiempos para el desarrollo de nuevos productos. El mercado obliga a las empresas a una transición de la secuencia a la ingeniería concurrente, y como el trabajo en equipo es el elemento básico de la ingeniería concurrente, se presta especial atención a los grupos de trabajo que se forman en los bucles de proceso de desarrollo de productos concurrentes en las empresas.…”

The responsiveness of Italian small-to-medium sized plants: dimensions and determinants

“…This correlation has been proved also from the perspective of set-up times, which is a major indicator of operational flexibility. In fact, it has been demonstrated that they are likely to be shorter in manufacturing environments that enjoy favorable operating conditions, mainly related to the implementation of up-to-date production technologies and practices, which play a major role in the improvement of several plant performances, namely workforce flexibility (Pil and Fujimoto, 2007;Slack, 1987), production lines efficiency (Muchiri and Pintelon, 2008;Nakajima, 1988), product quality (Womack et al, 1990) and time to market (Starbek and Grum, 2002). …”

“…These evidences can be summarized in the following propositions: Some of the aforementioned peculiarities are often attributed to SMEs that generally enjoy, compared to larger companies at least, a remarkable speed of the decision making processes due to a rather flat organization structure (Starbek et al, 2002) and also to the presence of production employees endowed with technical skills, whose experience is often a relevant source of innovative ideas (Henny and Albaladejo, 2002;De Toni and Nassimbeni, 1996). On the opposite side, several studies highlight a number of structural problems of SMEs that prevents them to gain remarkable results in some key operational performances, as delivery reliability and conformance quality (Cagliano and Spina, 2002).…”