The purpose of concurrent engineering is to allow users to perform changes that are as yet un-approved or incomplete and keep these changes isolated in a project away from as-built records and other projects. This process includes the ability to manage long-term transactions that may span days, weeks, or months, as opposed to short-term transactions, typically supported by a database, and still maintain control of the records.
You do this by claiming data from a plant into a project, and then making changes, deleting items, and creating new items in the project, and so on. When all updates and changes are complete, you can merge the data back into the plant.