Crossfunctional Teams
Concurrent Engineering
Design for Manufacturing
Design for Environment
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What are the roles of the engineering and manufacturing operations at Nortel?
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Technologically, Northern Telecom has always been a driver and achieved excellence through having a fairly
significant engineering work-force behind the scenes, working issues around design and development and prod
uct modification and manufacturability, that will enable a product to be produced very quickly and very eff
iciently. To some degree they would always make the assumption that the production operation will always b
e manned by workers who generally don't have to think too much, and that the work is in fact fairly simple
and straight forward. This is changing rapidly through the skill development amongst the manufacturing ope
ration employees, such that they are taking on much more of the traditional activities that the engineer us
e to carry out.
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How is concurrent engineering viewed at Northern Telecom?
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Concurrent engineering is a concept which is very important to Northern Telecom. We can't afford to have d
esigners throw their designs over a wall to manufacturing. All that does is increase our intervals and tim
e to market. We need for the manufacturing engineers to recognize the designers requirements and visa vers
a, for the designers to recognize manufacturing requirements. They need to work together during the produc
tion process so that we can shorten the time to market.
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