The reorganization of product design, development, production planning and procurement processes to take place to the extent possible in parallel (more or less at the same time), utilizing multi-disciplinary project teams, electronic information management, and improved communications.
Input is gathered and assimilated from all concerned parties, including manufacturing, sales, procurement, customers, and etc. from project conception throughout development.
Coments: No manufacturing plant is better off engineering products in a vacuum. This approach challenges earlier out-dated thinking that the engineers will hand-over new products when they have designed them. With concurrent Engineering all (most in reality), of the stakeholders have a say in the design of products.
We have often encountered products that were so difficult to manufacture because engineers were unaware of certain machine idiosyncrasies or limitations, or human effort required to manufacture the products.