Abstract
Abstract
Ever increasing competition is forcing engineering companies to look closely at their processes to identify ways of reducing cost and increasing quality. In the manufacturing process, in particular, this has led to the widespread use of metrics for performance measurement. Companies are also looking to their design processes for performance improvement through the use of concurrent engineering and other quality techniques, but the application of metrics to this area is difficult and has been limited, in the main, to measures of performance against programme rather than of design quality. This paper suggests that an important measure of design quality is the level of unnecessary rework present in the design process. The paper presents a method for assessing rework through the use of metrics that, most importantly, identify how design quality may be improved.