Challenges and Benefits to the Implementation of Integrated Product Teams on Large Military Procurements

In 1991, General Dynamics Convair Division set a goal of reducing
their products life cycle costs by 40 percent. They felt that much of
the 40 percent improvement would be achieved by improving their
product definition and delivery processes. They further felt that the
key to this goal was another goal they had set for themselves, which
was to reduce the number of changes (internal) by an order of
magnitude.14

In 1992, a team from the General Dynamics Space Systems Division
set out to quantify the value of concurrent engineering. They bench
marked several non-concurrent engineering programs to a similar
program that used concurrent engineering. They found that
concurrent engineering reduced the cost by 35 percent overall.
Unplanned engineering changes were reduced 70 percent, and
hardware discrepancies were reduced by 80 and 90 percent for (in
house) and (out-house) respectively.15