問3
頻出度★★☆
製品開発のライフサイクルにおいて, 技術開発や製品の機能設計, ハードウェア設計, 試作, 製造準備といった作業工程のうち, 同時にできる作業は並行して進め, 手戻りや待ちをなくして製品開発期間を短縮する手法はどれか。
平成24年度 春期 ITパスポート試験 問3
This question's explanation and your answers so far.
解説
問 3
Incorrectア
Industrial engineering (IE, also called management engineering or production engineering) is a body of methods that takes as its object the system of work made up of people, equipment, materials, and information; it analyzes processes scientifically through work study, time study, and similar techniques, and removes waste, unevenness, and overburden in order to raise productivity and efficiency. What it mainly improves is the work on the production floor itself. It is not the term for the idea this question asks about — reorganizing development processes to run at the same time, in parallel, so as to shorten the development period.
- イ
正解 The correct answer is イ, concurrent engineering. Concurrent means “taking place at the same time, in parallel.” It is a method in which the processes that make up the product development life cycle — technology development, function design, hardware design, prototyping, manufacturing preparation, and so on — are not run serially (waterfall style), starting the next process only after the previous one has finished as was traditionally done. Instead, departments such as design, manufacturing, procurement, and quality assurance share information from an early stage, and tasks that can be started at the same time are advanced in parallel. There are two aims. First, by taking the requirements of the later processes (manufacturing and maintenance) into account already at the design stage, you prevent rework such as going back to design after the product turns out to be hard to make once manufacturing starts. Second, because the idle time spent waiting for the previous process to finish is reduced, the overall development period (lead time) becomes shorter than the simple sum of the individual processes. The two points the question raises — “advance in parallel the tasks that can be done at the same time” and “eliminate rework and waiting to shorten the product development period” — are exactly the definition of concurrent engineering, so イ is appropriate.
Incorrectウ
Value engineering (VE) treats the value of a product or service as “value = function ÷ cost,” and maximizes value by lowering cost while maintaining or improving the required functions. Its focus is the relationship between function and cost, not the ordering of processes or the development period. Even if VE lowers cost, as long as the processes remain serial, rework and waiting are not resolved, and the development period is not shortened.
Incorrectエ
Reverse engineering is a method of taking apart and analyzing an existing product or piece of software in order to reveal its structure, specification, and design information. Its direction is the opposite: rather than building a product from a design, it traces back from the finished product to extract the design information. It is used for analyzing other companies’ products, or for maintaining and rebuilding existing systems whose specification documents have been lost. It is not a method for running the processes of upcoming product development in parallel to shorten the period.
ここがポイント
- Definition of concurrent engineering: instead of letting the processes of product development (technology development, function design, hardware design, prototyping, manufacturing preparation, and so on) flow one after another, related departments share information from an early stage and carry out in parallel the tasks that can be done at the same time, cutting rework and waiting so as to shorten the development period (lead time).
- Telling apart the confusable “… engineering” terms: IE = analyze the work and remove waste to raise productivity; VE = raise value through function ÷ cost; reverse engineering = analyze an existing product to obtain design information. Distinguish them by what each one aims at (period / productivity / value / grasping the specification).
用語