Quality in the integrated product team

In the early phases of product development quality must be engineered and managed into the product.

The most visible step to implement when a company tries to adopt a concurrent engineering philosophy is to form multidiscipline product teams, also known as integrated product teams (IPTs). Most aircraft engineering firms have employed this approach, with resulting benefits and cost savings. To truly understand what lies behind concurrent engineering, it is necessary to dig deeper into what engineers actually do.

The concurrent engineering process is managed via a framework called integrated product development (IPD). IPD basically outlines a series of phases, or periods, that product development goes through. Each phase starts with a review of the entrance criteria and ends with a review of the exit criteria. The critical issue is to determine the requirements at the beginning and end of the phases to promote quality within the IPT. The selection of these requirements, or gate deliverables, is crucial to the concurrent engineering process. The following points must be determined for each gate deliverable: a description of the deliverable and its required format; explanation of how to create the gate deliverable and the interactions between team members; access to the relevant systems, training material, and user guides; and determination that the process is do-able in the given time period.