6. Simultaneous engineering in everyday life

6.1 Project team

The key to successful simultaneous engineering lies in the selection and implementation of project teams. Bringing together multi-disciplinary and even multi-company skills, they are led by project managers with cross-functional responsibility within the company. This marks the transition from a company structured by function or task to one organized around a product developed in the form of a project born of a customer need. This project is first entrusted to a project manager, who generally leads three teams of a dozen or so people, each grouping together several trades.

The first team, known as the pre-study team, is made up of people from marketing, research, industrial design, methods, production, logistics, purchasing and quality. Its...