Human Centered Industry - Emotional Engineering - page 45

Let us take an apple for example. If there is only one apple, and two brothers
want to eat apple, then there will be a quarrel. But if we split an apple into half and
give each half to brothers separately, then they will be happy. Splitting an apple
before giving it to two brothers is wisdom or knowledge. It is non-physical. CE
notices that there are common pieces of knowledge you can share.
Traditional CE focused its attention on how we can reduce time to market
because it was originally developed for military competition, although later it was
expanded to civilian industry sectors. Thus, reduction of time to product realization
was mandatory. Reduction of time to market is also welcomed by civilian industry,
because they are ! fighting another war on the market. And this reduction meant
nothing other than increase of productivity. Increasing productivity was becoming
more and more dif ! cult. But if we note knowledge is nonphysical, we can increase
productivity remarkably. Thus, CE spread very quickly and widely.
But CE is not so much appreciated today by industry as it was. Why? This is
because customers' requirements are diversifying very quickly and extensively.
Yesterday, industry can survive by mass production. So CE yesterday had much to
offer for industry. But today industry has to customize their products to meet the
diverse requirements of their customers. Customization becomes more important
than fast product realization.
Another important issue is energy saving. It becomes crucially important for
sustainable development. The reduction of energy consumption directly relates to
cost reduction. The more they can reduce energy, the more pro ! ts they will get.
Thus, new CE has emerged.
4.3 New Concurrent Engineering
CE yesterday only solved one dimensional problem. It solved the problem with
respect to time. But if we expand CE into 2 dimensions, i.e., time and space, then
we could adapt CE to the current situations. CE today will be illustrated as shown in
Fig. 11 . As we expand CE from one dimension to two dimensions, the reduction of
space becomes greater because we can pack the whole processes in much smaller
box.
But an extension of CE from one dimension to two dimensions is still based on
the traditional industrial framework of sequential engineering. The quickly pro-
gressing diversi ! cation calls for more drastic changes in our industrial framework.
4.4 Lego-Style Industry — Parallel Distributed Engineering
The author would like to propose a new industry framework here. Let us call it
Parallel Distributed Engineering (PDE).