Research On New Methods Of Implementing Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering

"Customer-focused management"and "time-based competition"are the hot topics nowadays. How to provide customized products as rapidly as possible is becoming the new target for the enterprises to strive for competitive advantage. It calls for enterprises coordinating product design, process design and supply chain design and implementing Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering. The innovative contributions of this dissertation have been generalized as such: Firstly, what is coordinating product design, manufacturing process design and supply chain design has been explained by an analytical method in the product architecture perspective by the component level and the product level. Product architecture, especially modular product architecture, interacts with manufacturing process design and supply chain design, as proved by the cases in auto and personal computer industry. Finally, an optimal "modular level"has been certained through an economic analytical method. Secondly, how to design an effective product platform to integrate the decisions of products design, manufacturing process design and supply chain design has been modeled. A systematic method is got on how to establish the optimal manufacturing process and supply chain through component commonality. Thirdly, the match relationship among product types, manufacturing process and supply chain design is focused on. It has been found that functional products match with efficient manufacturing process and supply chain while innovative products match with agile manufacturing process and supply chain. For the enterprises affording standardized and customized products, there are two choices on manufacturing process and supply chain design. The optimal decision depends on different parameters, such as the comparative costs between the different manufacturing process and supply chain as well as the demand variation of customized product. The strategy of operation reversals has been analyzed through the method of Bayesian statistics which has proved that the manufacture's profit could be increased when the characters with high variation is postponed. Fourthly, Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering is defined, and we generalize some of the organizational and informational exchange methods of Cross-Functional Teams in Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering environment. Fifthly, we have compared Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering with Two-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering and have developed a Three-Dimensional Concurrent Engineering model to develop modular products .