Today's industrial products result from a seamless process that spans a range of activities from initial conception to fabrication. The process is seamless because of the interde-pendencies of all production stages. In the early stages, for example, fundamental values are established, such as technichal specifications and cost, which have a basic influence on production. For many products, growing complexity has resulted in a steady lengthening of development times. On the other hand, the increasing pace of innovation is shortening the lifespan of each product generation. The resulting need to enter the market quickly with new customer-specific products has encouraged efforts to accelerate product development processes. There are different approaches to achieving this: simultaneous or concurrent engineering as well as rapid prototyping (RP).
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