Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 15, 731±751, 2004 # 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Manufactured in The Netherlands. A survey on the methods and tools of concurrent new product development and agile manufacturing GU È LC Ë _ IN BU È YU È KO È ZKAN 1 , TU È RKAY DEREL _ I 2 and AD _ IL BAYKASOG Æ LU 2 1 Galatasaray University, Industrial Engineering Department, 80840, Istanbul, Turkey 2 University of Gaziantep, Department of Industrial Engineering, 27310 Gaziantep, Turkey Received October 2002 and accepted December 2003 Companies in either manufacturing or servicing have to be restructured or re-organized in order to overcome with challenges of the 21st century in which customers are not only satis®ed but also delighted. In this competitive environment, organizations should use a ¯exible, adaptive and responsive paradigm that can be entitled by a unique term: agile manufacturing (AM). An AM system is able to develop a variety of product at low cost and in a short time period. For this, it has some of useful enabling technologies and physical tools. Among these, concurrent engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to the integrated, concurrent design of product and their related processes, including manufacture and support. It is then a useful and bene®cial approach to reduce the development time and manufacturing cost, while simultaneously improving the quality of a product in order to better respond to the customer expectations. The aim of this study is to underline the synergistic impact of new product development (NPD) and CE, (which can be called CNPD), and to survey their methods and tools in association with the AM. Keywords: Agile responsive manufacturing, concurrent new product development, concurrent engineering 1. Introduction Companies either in manufacturing or servicing have to be restructured or re-organized in order to overcome the challenges of the twenty-®rst century in which customers are not only satis®ed but also delighted. The needs of customers are now highly speci®c and rapidly changing, although they still want to have high-quality and low-cost products/ services. The companies should respond to these new, rapid, continuous and predictable changes in environment and should provide a suitable product/ service variety in order to survive and be competi- tive in the market (Anderson, 1997). Therefore, in this competitive environment, organizations should use a ¯exible, adaptive and responsive paradigm that can be entitled by a unique term: agile manufac- turing (AM) (Gunasekaran, 1999a). AM is a new paradigm and pushes no previous techniques, strategies or approaches like ¯exible manufacturing or lean manufacturing; although some have claimed that they are similar. However, it is not, since agility has a different meaning and connotations than that of ¯exibility and leanness. AM can only be synonymous with responsive manufacturing in a broad sense that is de®ned as the capability of surviving and prospering in a rapidly, continuously and unpredictably changing environment, by responding quickly and effectively and by taking a customer's views into account. The responsive manufacturing enterprise has organizational charac- teristics which allow it to outperform competitors by excelling simultaneously in ®ve domains (Gindy, 1998):