A self-assessment tool for implementing concurrent engineeringthrough change management

Matthew Ainscough, Kevin Neailey, Charles Tennant*

Warwick Manufacturing Group, School of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK

Received 19 December 2001; received in revised form 20 September 2002; accepted 19 November 2002

Abstract

A review of various tools for assisting organisations to implement Concurrent Engineering (CE) found they tend to operate

independently from each other, rather than being integrated to rigorously manage the change towards effective assessment anddeployment. A new workbook style tool is proposed, which is based on a self-assessment model to enable the implementation of CEthrough a change management strategy. The combination of self-assessment and change management enables the simultaneousmeasurement and deployment of practices, which can assist organisations in the project management of product development, and

lead to the identification of further improvements to rigorously manage the transition to CE. The new tool described was imple-mented at London Taxis International (a large sized UK based automotive company) and led to the creation of a formalised newproduct introduction process, implementation of a project management system, and enhanced teamworking at the company.

# 2003 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved.

Keywords: New product introduction; Self-assessment; Change management; Concurrent engineering; Product development; Project management

1. Introduction

An effective New Product Introduction (NPI) process,which is concurrent, can enhance an organisation’scompetitiveness by compressing product developmentlead-times, and enabling upstream and downstreamprocesses to be considered when taking decisions at theproduct concept phase [1,2]. This approach is typicallydescribed as Concurrent Engineering (CE) and isdescribed by Carter and Baker as ‘the systematicapproach to the integrated, concurrent design of productsand their related processes, including manufacture andsupport’ [3]. Therefore, CE represents an organisation’sability to carry out product development as a series ofoverlapping phases, which delivers product on time, toprovide customer satisfaction at the right price [4]. Toachieve this requires a ‘right-first-time’ approach byapplying numerous tools and techniques during the

project management of product development, to enableeffective decision-making [5,6]. Whilst the business ben-efits of CE are well understood, a recent survey of UKindustry concluded that although its implementationwithin certain sectors such as power generation, petro-chemical and aerospace was claimed to be at a highlevel, other sectors such as automobile and machineryreported relatively low levels [7]. This is supported byViness, Chidolue and Medhat who concluded that 50%of large UK companies were not fully mature in thedeployment of CE [8]. The reasons for this were thoughtto be due to poor management of the change process,rather than a lack of motivation to manage change.Furthermore, Stickland suggests that ‘70% of all com-panies who embark upon a business process re-engineeringprogram will fail’ [9]. Kotter states that companies oftenstruggle to manage change, because they do not take aprocess based approach. Instead they look for short cutsby expecting individuals to execute new working prac-tices without training or any awareness of its need [10].Therefore this suggests that the low take up of CEwithin UK industry is due primarily to companies notknowing how CE should be deployed within theorganisation through the management of change.

0263-7863/03/$30.00 # 2003 Elsevier Ltd and IPMA. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/S0263-7863(02)00081-9

International Journal of Project Management 21 (2003) 425–431

www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: charles.tennant@warwick.ac.uk (C. Tennant).

2. Research objectives

The main theme underpinning this research was toinvestigate: ‘‘How can UK industry be more effective atleveraging concurrent engineering practices within theirorganisations?’’ The research objectives were subsequentlydefined as follows:

� To develop a system, which will enable theimplementation of CE practices.

� To verify that the system is effective by applyingit within a UK organisation.

3. Comparison of approaches for enabling change

To identify the requirements for a new tool, whichcould enable UK industry to manage change towardCE, eight approaches for managing change were identi-fied as: Self-assessment, Benchmarking, SWOT analysis,Auditing, Kaizen, Policy Deployment, Project Manage-ment and Control, and Workbook ImplementationMethods. To assess the perceived effectiveness of theeight approaches they were reviewed against six criteriadefined based upon a previous survey that identified anumber of common barriers to implementing CE. Thecriteria were: knowledge of CE, measure current andidentify future states, provide a scoring system, easy toapply, involves everyone, identifies key phases forchange [11]. This identified that there is no singleapproach for enabling change that addresses all the cri-teria defined for effective change management. How-ever, any two of Self-assessment, Auditing orWorkbook Implementation Methods will do. Auditingwas discounted as it is problematic and fosters a ‘passthe audit’ mentality—rather than encouraging a cultureof process improvement and organisational learning.Therefore, it was decided that the development of anintegrated approach combining both Self-assessmentand an Implementation Workbook would be the opti-mum combination for organisations to manage thechange towards CE, by simultaneously measuring andimplementing the required practices.

4. Self-assessment and workbook methods

4.1. Self-assessment methods

Self-assessment has been popularised by various highprofile National Quality Awards such as the ‘DemingPrize’, the ‘Malcolm Baldridge National QualityAward—MBNQA’, and the ‘European Foundation forQuality Management—EFQM’ [12]. Self-assessment

systems have also emerged for measuring thedeployment of CE, and identifying areas for improve-ment. Five different self-assessment tools for CE werefound, which aim to either assess CE or the innovationprocess: Successful Product Development [13], Time toMarket Association [14], A Technical Innovation Audit[15], Readiness for Concurrent Engineering [16], andMentor Graphics Self-Assessment Tool [3]. In all casesthey aim to measure an organisation’s current stateagainst a model of practice, and provide a means toidentify future improvements. A review of these CE self-assessment tools concluded the following:

� They measure ‘where are we now?’ and ‘where dowe want to be?’ However, they do not provide anaid for facilitating implementation. This providesan opportunity to develop a tool, which assessesand deploys good CE practice.

� They all assume one model for all organisationsand do not provide an opportunity tailor themodel for an organisation’s specific circum-stances.

� They do not pay enough attention to the appli-cation of CE from the perspective of achievingspecific design philosophies, such as design formanufacture, service, reliability, customerrequirements and cost.

� They do not place enough emphasis upon per-formance measures as a means to ascertainwhether improvements are delivering to thebottom line.

4.2. Workbook Implementation Methods

Two Workbook Implementation Methods have beendesigned specifically for implementing CE throughusing a project management and control relatedapproach. These are ‘Using Concurrent Engineering forBetter Product Development’ (Cranfield approach) and‘A Practical Approach to Concurrent Engineering’(PACE) [17,18]. The Cranfield approach consists ofthree phases: prepare, implement, and extend; and onlyuses a pilot approach as a means for deploying practicebefore company wide implementation. Furthermore, itis targeted toward first time users rather than organisa-tions that are relatively mature in its application and arelooking for areas that require improvements. PACE onthe other hand, has seven phases: develop a strategy,assessment, create the culture, prioritise improvements,plan the change, implement improved situation, andsupport implementation. However, PACE prescribes ageneric implementation process that has not been testedwithin an industrial context.

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5. A new tool for implementing CE through change

management

5.1. Requirements

The research justified the requirement for a new toolbased on a self-assessment system integrated with animplementation process through change management toenable UK based companies to deploy CE. Therefore, aself-assessment system integrated with a change man-agement methodology was created incorporating somenew tools/techniques developed in this research. Theapplication of the tool is described under four mainstages.

5.2. Stage 1—where are we now?

A self-assessment model was developed to provide anorganisation with the opportunity to assess its perfor-mance and practice against specific industry sectorswithin UK industry. Fig. 1 shows that six main practicecomponents of CE are assessed along with a set ofimplementation methods and techniques that shouldenable the achievement of improved performanceoutputs such as quality, cost, and time.The model is structured as a hierarchy where each

component is broken down into a set of criteria whichfurther breakdown down into a list of ‘requirements forconsistency’ to ensure a robust assessment of each cri-terion. The assessment model can be tailored to takeinto consideration an organisation’s specific industryrequirements and priorities. Fig. 2 presents the tailoringprocess developed, which demonstrates that to tailor themodel, the company’s strategy; its market requirements

and prioritised design philosophies required to meet thestrategy and requirements need to be understood. Spe-cific criteria grouped under design philosophies forachieving CE can then be selected from the model torepresent the organisations requirements. This approachwas based upon principles defined by Porter [19].To assess the current state of CE within a company, it

is necessary to score the organisation against theassessment model criteria and requirements for con-sistency for each component. This was based on theassessment method used by the EFQM framework [12].A score of zero, one, two or three has to be allocatedwhich represents a situation where none, less than half,more than half or all the requirements for consistencyfor that criterion is found within the organisation. Toestablish an overall benchmark for each component, thescore allocated to each criterion is summed to provide amaximum score of one hundred and is represented on aspider diagram for all components against the desiredmaturity scale. This allows the collation of a strengthsand opportunities report, a current benchmark state,and a maturity level; which are then communicated tosenior management who should then appoint a guidingcoalition—or senior level champion within the company.

5.3. Stage 2—where do we want to be?

To establish a future desired state it is necessary tounderstand whether the components of CE and embed-ded practices are relevant to the organisation. Thisrequires a model of desired practice to be built whichwill provide the required competitive advantage. Toundertake this process criteria which impactquality, cost, and time for each of the six components of

Fig. 1. Concurrent engineering self-assessment model.

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the self-assessment model were developed from the lit-erature. This helps to gain and understanding of thepriority performance measures, and selecting the rele-vant design philosophies for impacting those measures.Finally, the desired state prescribed has to be translatedinto a future state benchmark profile representing wherethe company wants to be.

5.4. Stage 3—plan for implementation

Once a current and a future state have been defined, itnecessary to plan how the company should move from

one operational state to another. The system embodies anumber of planning tools, where in addition to standardplanning tools selected from the literature, two addi-tional tools have been developed. An ‘ImplementationStrategy Tool’ was developed which assists the organi-sation to select whether it wants to take a pilot, radicalor a gradual (incremental) approach to change as shownin Fig. 3. The main deciding factors are the sense ofurgency for the requirement of CE and uncertaintyabout whether it will be successfully deployed.To assist with defining the implementation plan a

‘Generic Planning and Guidance Tool’ was developed

Fig. 2. Tailoring process.

Fig. 3. Implementation strategy tool.

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as illustrated by Fig. 4 which defines the main activitiesrequired to implement and mature each CE componentdepending upon the organisations current level ofmaturity.

5.5. Stage 4—deployment

To assist in the deployment of practices, a number oftools were selected from the literature. The selectionprocess is aimed at identifying tools, which support thedefinition and deployment of practices such as an NPIprocess and teamwork. Nevertheless, they are not com-prehensive and additional tools can be included ifrequired by the user.

6. Testing the new approach through a case study

To test whether the new tool was effective at enablingchange toward CE, a case study was carried out atLondon Taxis International (LTI); a large sized auto-mobile manufacturer, based in Coventry, UK [20]. Theaim was to establish whether the implementation pro-cess and tools were successful at enabling change, andwhether the practices specified impacted project perfor-mance. Initially the self-assessment model and tailoringprocess were applied as first introduced in Figs. 1 and 2,which established that the company strategy was to be a‘first mover with a cost focus’ strategy, and the marketrequirements were ‘improved quality at lower costs’.

This led to a selection of product development philoso-phies including parallel NPI activities and design for:manufacture, serviceability, reliability, customerrequirements, and cost. Furthermore, the self-assess-ment model as introduced in Fig. 1 was also applied toestablish the current state. Some difficulties wereencountered during the application of the self-assess-ment process partly because normally a prerequisite toeffective self-assessment is the adoption of an appro-priate model or framework, which the MBNQA andEFQM provide for company wide holistic self-assess-ment. But this had not been previously established atLTI. Therefore, the authors’ had to convince the man-agement team of the principle that the main focus ofself-assessment is continuous improvement throughorganisational learning, which the more conventional(and accepted) audit and review approach does notfacilitate. The hypothesis that traditional project reviewapproaches are inadequate, and that self-assessment is apreferable alternative had to be—and was—bought intoby the management team. In the authors’ experience ofapplying self-assessment at companies the managementbuy-in process is essential, but is problematic due to thecommonly held misconception that it is a ‘soft’approach primarily used in the adoption of EFQM typequality models (and awards). The subsequent self-assessment at LTI confirmed that the company’s currentbest achievement was against teamwork, and that it wasonly at an ‘early developer’ stage for the other areas offormal NPI process, information technology, tools and

Fig. 4. Generic planning and guidance tool.

M. Ainscough et al. / International Journal of Project Management 21 (2003) 425–431 429

techniques, supply chain management, and projectmanagement. It also failed to meet a number of perfor-mance indicators relating to quality, cost and time. Abenchmark profile was captured on a spider diagramrepresenting LTI’s current and future state. A pilot fol-lowed by a radical approach to implementation wasidentified for LTI using the implementation strategytool as illustrated in Fig. 3. This was due to a state ofhigh urgency resulting from the threat of new competi-tion and uncertainty as a result of a high resistance tochange and low levels of knowledge and familiarity ofCE at the company. The implementation plan wasdeveloped using the Generic Planning and GuidanceTool as illustrated in Fig. 4 and incorporated a numberof future objectives for improvement, which addressedthree of the ‘early developer’ areas and aimed to buildon the main strength of teamwork. These included:

� A formal NPI process with phases of productdevelopment, project reviews with checklists,concurrency and tier level definition of activitiesusing process mapping tools.

� Teamworking improvements by building con-current working into the NPI process to furtherenhance cross-functional problem solving as ameans to enable concurrency between processes,and design: for manufacture, to cost, for servi-ceability, for customer requirements, and relia-bility.

� A project management system built into the NPIprocess to guide the definition and implemen-tation of an overall programme plan and workpackage plans using historical data, risk man-agement tools and processes and a project de-brief as a means to control and learn from pro-jects.

London Taxis International have applied—andtherefore tested—the above on two product pro-grammes and have achieved improvements to cost,quality, and lead-time. A company-wide implemen-tation plan is currently being implemented, which alsoaddresses further areas such as information technologyand supply chain management.

7. Conclusions

The main theme of this research was to explore thequestion: ‘‘How can UK industry be more effective atleveraging concurrent engineering practices within theirorganisations?’’ A review of existing tools to enablechange concluded that any two of self-assessment,auditing or workbook implementation methods addressall the criteria defined for effective change management.Therefore, it was concluded that the development of an

integrated approach combining both self-assessmentand an implementation workbook could enable organi-sations to manage the change towards CE by encoura-ging a culture of process improvement andorganisational learning. Some new tools were developedin the research: an Assessment Model, an Implemen-tation Strategy Tool, and a Generic Planning and Gui-dance tool. Furthermore, the process was designed toprovide a means by which to tailor the self-assessmentmodel to suit an organisations specific industry needs.The new tool was validated at London Taxis Interna-tional on two product programmes to create a for-malised new product introduction process, implement aproject management system, and enhance teamworking.A company-wide implementation plan is currently beingimplemented, to improve the remaining areas of weaknesswith their current approach.

Acknowledgements

This work was undertaken as part of an EPSRCsponsored Engineering Doctorate (EngD) Programmeat the University of Warwick.

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