Product Duality in Concurrent Engineering

摘要

The aim of the paper is to bring a new point of view on the purposes of the concurrent engineering and to extend them to another scientist context. We will show a product-orientated point of view on the concurrent engineering. We will explain the main following hypothesis: the concurrent engineering has not just for goal to design, in a simultaneous way, the product and its manufacturing system but, more fundamentally, to design, in the same time, the functional aspects and the physical aspects of the product, which is both a generic object and an individual object. After a definition of what are the generic product and the individual product and a presentation of their differences, we will explain how the concurrent engineering allows treating globally this duality of the product. This representation of the concurrent engineering highlights the main problem of the nowadays customer-orientated factories. The factory, seen as a double value chain, creates two kinds of products (generic and individual) and so exchanges them with two kinds of customers or two recipients (the supposed final customer of the individual product and the known final customer of the generic product). There is a danger, for the factory, to treat, in a sequential way, the design of its two products and the satisfaction of its two customers. The concurrent engineering gives a good answer to this problem. However, for implementing the concurrent engineering in this context, we will suggest to develop and to use two complementary concepts following the previous ones: the intermediate customers and the intermediate objects. We will propose a typology of these intermediate customers and we will show the interest to define and to use the intermediate objects that are exchanged between these actors along the value chain of the factory.