Jambekar, Anil B., "A System View of Design Engineering Capacity: Continuous Improvement Policy Interaction", 1996
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With many companies implementing continuous improvement policy to enhance all company operations, everybody is knocking on design engineering's door because 'coordinated up-front design engineering plays a central role in enhancing the performance of re-engineered or improved manufacturing process. Today many manufacturing strategies embrace the goals of reducing "time to development", "time to ship", "defects per million," and "cost" every year. The articulated associated policies create pressures on various manufacturing divisions, design engineering, and marketing and product planning to respond by continuous examinations of their operations for potential improvements or re-engineering. The consequence is production of the design work-load that some times far exceeds existing design capacity. This clearly emerges as a management problem that has been viewed in this paper through systems thinking lens.