Early on, with the technological developments, machines have replaced the human workers which pave the way to mass production for decades. With the increase of variety of goods and number of producers, competition has grown to produce cheap, high number of goods with high quality. This has led the producers to think about ways to lessen the scraps and prevent problems. Thus, techniques and approaches like Total Quality Management, Lean Manufacturing, Six-Sigma have been developed and grown in importance.

Whereas in today's competitive world what is counted as success is no more the ability to produce but also to design. World trend is growing to find ways to design the most rapid, cost effective and quality product. In a similar way to the progress of production, new approaches, methodologies and principles are being generated and initiatives are established to fulfill this need in engineering area.

Challenges increase in diversity and difficulty in parallel with the complexity of the design. Until now, companies used product data management methods and tools in order to integrate and provide the running of the tasks. Further developments in information technology shall be used to put in more knowledge to these systems to lessen the routine design work while enabling the designer to touch the tacit-knowledge.

This paper will examine the lean thinking in engineering and try to harmonize the Lean Engineering Approach with Concurrent Engineering (CE) Philosophy. Principles to enable CE applications in Aerospace Industry will be developed and an analogy of Lean techniques will be outlined.