ITPEC IP April 2026 Question 89
Which of the following is an appropriate description of concurrent engineering?
Explanation
Conducting planning, design, production and other processes in parallel as far as possible — concurrent engineering shortens the overall lead time.
Instead of handing a product from planning to design to production engineering to manufacturing one stage at a time, concurrent engineering has cross-functional teams work on these stages at the same time and share information early. Manufacturing, quality and cost problems are caught while the design can still change cheaply, which shortens development time and cuts rework.
Answer (d)
Why not others:
- •(a) — disassembling an existing product and analysing its structure to acquire its technology is reverse engineering
- •(b) — fundamentally rethinking the flow and methods of work to reform operations is BPR (business process reengineering)
- •(c) — setting the conditions so that experiments need the fewest trials is design of experiments (for example, with orthogonal arrays)
Key rule: "Concurrent" means simultaneous: overlap the stages and involve downstream departments from the start to cut the total lead time.
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