The purpose of CE is to improve product quality, develop products that meet customers' expectations, reduce product costs and accelerate product development projects. It aims at ensuring that the product can be designed correctly from the very beginning. Communications of the virtual office type will be an essential part of CE in a number of industrial branches. Prototyping are often time-consuming from the point of view of production so that their manufacturing must already be taken into consideration when drawing up production forecasts. Changing the product at the mass production stage may cost thousand times more than changing it at the planning stage.
In CE functions are performed through cooperation between departments which are communicating with each other directly, the information thus flowing from all the departments to each and every department ( Youssef 1994). The various stages of product development are thus carried out jointly and their also overlap in terms of time in that they are partly performed simultaneously. In extensive organisations, this can be achieved through video communications.
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