Benchmarking and readiness assessment for concurrent engineering in construction (BEACON)

In the increasingly competitive business environment reduced project cost, improved time-to-market, better quality products, and customer involvement are becoming the key success factors for any product development process. Many organisations within different industries are now focusing on concurrent engineering (CE) to bring improvements to their product development process in order to keep pace with the competitive environment. The adoption of CE has shown positive effects on project quality, cost, lead time, schedule, and customer satisfaction. For a targeted and effective implementation, it is recommended to carry out a readiness assessment of an organisation prior to the adoption of CE. This thesis discusses the adoption of CE within the construction industry, reviews existing CE readiness assessment tools used in other industry sectors, and assesses their applicability to construction. It then presentsa new developed CE readiness assessment tool for construction called the 'BEACON Model', its associated questionnaire, and associated software. Description and results of CE readiness assessment case studies, which were conducted within five sectors of the construction industry, are then presented. At the end of the thesis, CE implementation strategies and considerations are presented based on the assessment results, followed by conclusions, recommendations and future work. The most important conclusion from the research is that the construction industry, as a whole, still needs improvements in most of the critical areas identified by the BEACON Model in order to adopt CE effectively.