Improving construction process through integration and concurrent engineering

In an increasingly competitive business environment, improved time-to-market, reduced production cost, quality of the product and customer involvement are rapidly becoming the key success factors for any product development process. Consequently, most organisations are moving towards the adoption of latest technology and new management concepts and philosophies such as total quality management and concurrent engineering (CE) to bring improvement in their product development process. This paper discusses the adoption of integrated processes and CE within the construction industry to enable construction organisations to improve their project development process. It also discusses a proposed integrated database model for the construction projects, which should enable the construction process to improve, become more effective and more efficient.