Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 9, No. 2, 1998 A Concurrent Workflow Management Process for Integrated Product Development BIREN PRASAD, FUJUN WANG & JIATI DENG (9) C\RFAX SUMMARY This paper describes a systematic concurrent workfiow n1anage1nent (WM) process for integrated product developnzent. WM consists of planning and scheduling teams' activities to suppo1t cooperative and concurrent works. This paper firsr explains process re-engineering, flowcharting and va1ious workfiow practices in concurrent engineering (CE) to come up with a general process for WM. The WM process is based on an infomiation infrastructure containing nzodels of product require1nenrs, enterpn"se organization and resources, including the workjlow activity. Finally, technologies supporti'ng WM such as work process tnodeling, peifonnance analyzing, process re-engineering straregies to redesign the process and activtiy 1nanagenzent-t-eal-tinie task's rnonitoring-are introduced. 1. Introduction Concurrent engineering (CE) is a systematic approach for considering all aspects of a product's life cycle management including the integration of planning, design, pro- duction and related phases. CE needs a number of experts from multi-disciplinary groups to cooperate in a computer network environment. In order to organize a cooperative team and direct its efforts, it is necessary to model the enterprise process and decompose it into workftow activities. It is also necessary to develop concurrent schedules that can overlay these activities in parallel by allowing one workftow activity to overlap with another. This is essential to achieve time compression and optimal performance (with respect to meeting customer and company interests, such as X-abil- ity considerations) for the product's design and development. Workftow management (WM) is an analysis or a study of the business process in an enterprise or a company so as to optimize the flow of 'product', 'work', 'organization' and 'resource' (Fig. 1). The 'optimizing workflow' means determining an effective distribution of the aforementioned elements. The traditional workflow for product development (commonly referred to as an 'as-is workflow' is mostly serial. Such a process has loose organizational structures, does not share product models and/or lacks necessary cooperative tools. Many problems can occur with this mode of operation; the one that impacts the most is that it elongates the product development cycle time. CE concepts can be used to alleviate such problems. CE sets up a new matrix-based organizational structure and lets the parallel teams work cooperatively under a com- B. Prasad, Electronic Data systems, CERA Institute, PO Box 250254, West Bloomfield) MI 48325-0254, USA. Tel: 248 661 1838; Fax: 248 661 8333; E-mail: bprasad@cmsa.gmr.com. F. Wang and}. Deng, Institute of Manufacturing Systems, Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics, China. 0954--4828/98/020121-15 © 1998 Carfax Publishing Ltd