Engineering change management as a process enabler for collaborative product design (original) (raw)
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Engineering change analysis during ongoing product development
2007
Engineering changes are part of any design process. Changes are often requested even before a product design has been completed. However, change requests during an ongoing design process are difficult to assess because the design is still evolving. Some parts, where only conceptual designs exist, may be easy to change; other parts may already be frozen and hence more difficult and probably more expensive to change. In order to find the best way to implement a change at a given time, the designer needs to be aware of not only the design and the interactions, but also of the state of development of every part. However, many designers are not always aware of all interactions and, hence, unexpected and expensive change alternatives are chosen. This paper focuses on the question of how designers can be made aware of the impact of a proposed change before they commit. It discusses the links between the product, process and people domains that interact during product development, listing limiting factors that make change implementation risky and lead to increased change cost. The paper presents a tool to evaluate change proposals during ongoing design processes where the state of the development of parts is taken into account. The tool extends the Cambridge Change Prediction Method which assesses the risk of changes propagating between two parts. The paper concludes with the findings of two tool evaluation studies.
Engineering change management in individual and mass production
Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing, 2005
The ability to manage engineering changes (ECs) efficiently reflects the agility of an enterprise. A large majority of products become gradually improved and perfected through the developmental-design process, during which the set design requirements are met or even upgraded, thus prolonging the product life cycle. The concept of product improvement was based on the activation and tracking of (ECs) through the developmental-design phase and the manufacturing phase. A special method was used to recognize activities within the process and the degree of involvement of individual participants. The individuals involved in the process were provided with appropriate information and the required communication channels with others were ensured. The EC process was generalized and applied to different types of production. A product's complexity and design level were analyzed first, and key factors such as CE methods, process definition, information system, communication and organization were used as a tool for optimizing the EC process. The method was tested and successfully applied into industrial practice.
Decision-Making Assistance in Engineering-Change Management Process
2011
Effective engineering-change management (ECM) is a real challenge in mechanical engineering industry and manufacturing companies. Computer-aided design systems are usually connected to other systems such as ERP or product data management, but currently this integration does not provide effective means to manage engineering change (EC). While communication between multidisciplinary teams working on a project is known to have a significantly positive impact on the ECM, the communication between disciplines is generally performed solely through message exchange. Experts could feel the need to meet to agree on the requested changes, which in turn translates into longer design and manufacturing processes. There is a need for a system that assists human experts in making decisions about ECs. Such a system will considerably reduce the processing time following a change-request procedure. This paper proposes a collaborative tool named EchoMag, which assists designers and experts during the change-management process. The proposed system ensures the coherence of data between the various disciplines involved in the change process. EchoMag also assists experts in making decisions by proposing alternative solutions when change requests are not agreed upon. Software agents were used to implement EchoMag for which a prototype was developed. Results of the implementation are discussed. Index Terms-Computer-aided design (CAD), concurrent engineering, design process, engineering-change management (ECM), software agent. I. INTRODUCTION Designers are sometimes compelled to make important ECs on products. These products could be documents, parts, or processes. While changes are easily verified when they are made in the first stages of the design process, making ECs in the last stages of the design process can affect the production cost seriously. Studies have, in fact, shown that the engineering-change management (ECM) could represent from 70% to 80% of the final product's cost [1]. Existing engineering-data management (EDM) and PDM product data management (PDM) software offer some change management modules. However, these currently are far from satisfying the needs of companies working in a concurrent engineering environment. Forced to implement some ECM approach, some organizations are content with improving their change management procedures, while others decide Manuscript
Express Engineering Change Management
2007
Change is perhaps the most persistent aspect of product development. It could arise from external input that must be overcome but also from an explicit choice for improvement. In spite of this general appreciation, the management of engineering changes in development processes is lacking. Only recently this subject has started to attract a growing number of studies attempting to tame the impact of change on development processes. We propose that a plan for addressing change must include the use of carefully designed collection of design methods, termed design methodology. Such methodology must be tailored to the particular design context. We demonstrate through a case study, in the context of a high school mechatronics design course, that such a methodology leads to highly effective engineering change management. We conjecture that similar practices would be effective in industrial settings.
Research in Engineering Design, 2015
This paper reports a case study of design and engineering change management in the design and manufacture of automated train systems in a company. The paper uses a combination of surveys and interviews to map the information flow processes in the design and engineering processes. Based on the interviews and data collected on information flow and communication processes, the paper identifies the sources of engineering changes in the design process. Further, the paper takes cognizance of the change in the organizational structure of the company's engineering change processes to evaluate the engineering change notice (ECN) policies and its application in the company to identify the cause of errors in the engineering change process itself. Based on the analysis, the paper describes a support system that incorporates a novel, context-based ECN generation and workflow routing support system that is intended to reduce the cognitive load of the design engineer. The goal of the system is also to measure the causes of ECN to aid and improve managerial action. Keywords Information flow analysis Á Engineering change policies and management Á Organizational change Á Change support system
Change management in concurrent engineering from a parameter perspective
Computers in Industry, 2003
Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the balance of cost between activities within a firm and activities between firms. Easier co-operation allows companies to focus on their core strengths, while forming relations with other firms to supply the other needed skills to bring a product to market. Design, in one firm or in a consortium, is iterative and does require change. The ability of companies to better manage engineering changes (ECs) during product development can decrease cost, shorten development time, and produce higher quality products.This paper concerns engineering change management (ECM) when product development involves more than one company. A review of ECM related papers finds a lack of those that address multi-company design efforts. This approach is based upon recent work in collaborative engineering, which uses elementary engineering decisions, captured as parameters, to drive the collaboration. The relationship between parameters determines the involvement of suppliers and engineering partners. This allows design partners to be informed early as to the impact of design changes. We describe the use of this approach in simultaneous ECM, its implementation within a product data management (PDM) system, and initial test results. We term this approach as ’intelligent’ because it is based upon knowledge captured in the design process itself.
Viewpoints and views in engineering change management
Complexity in Design and Engineering
Visualising connectivity and change propagation in complex products is difficult, but nevertheless is a key for successful design. Several stakeholders, such as designers, managers and customers have different viewpoints on the designed artefact and require different information. Multiple views provide a means to visualise complex information and are also a way to fulfil the demands of different user groups. In this paper we introduce the concepts of multiple viewpoints and multiple views in engineering design and show how multiple views are integrated into a software tool for predicting change propagation.
International Journal of Production Research, 2020
Engineering Changes (ECs) are a fact of life for companies in the Engineer-To-Order (ETO) production environment. Various Engineering Change Management (ECM) strategies, practices and tools exist, but no explicit distinction has been made regarding ECM in different production environments. Using a multiple case study method, this article investigates how ETO companies manage ECs and how ETO characteristics influence ECM. A generic ECM framework was developed and used to map ECM in the cases. The study showed that ETO companies use similar practices for handling ECs, while ECM tools are either not used by the companies or used to a very limited extent. It was found that the use of some ECM practices and tools is complicated by specific ETO company characteristics. However, no reasons were found for the lack of computer-based tools, change propagation and impact assessment tools, change reduction and front-loading tools, and design tools. This suggests, firstly, that there is vast roo...
Managing Engineering Change within the Paradigm of Product Lifecycle Management
Processes
Managing change in organizations is a laborious task that consumes value added time in various segments of the product lifecycle including design and development, production, delivery, and product disposition. Product lifecycle management plays an important role in minimizing the time required for managing engineering changes. This research aims to perform an extensive survey of the literature in this area. There is no consolidated review available in this area summarizing advances in engineering change management vis-à-vis product lifecycle management. Thus, the paper gives an overview of product lifecycle management-based thinking and change management. This review puts forward the most relevant research regarding the practices and frameworks developed for managing engineering change in an organization. These include model-based definition, digital twin, process-based semantic approach, service-oriented architecture, Unified Modeling Language, and unified feature modeling. The gap...
An alternative framework for managing engineering change
2015 International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management (IEOM), 2015
Effective engineering change management (ECM) procedures are very important over the whole life cycle of every engineering change (EC), from EC proposal to implementation and documentation. However, the success of an EC procedure depends on the amount of focus on the critical areas of the EC project. The purpose of this research to develop an alternative ECM framework based on critical success factors of ECM. The study follows through three steps: (i) identify the common focus areas of ECM, (ii) identify, from past empirical studies, the critical success factors for ECM, and (iii) develop a proposed framework that incorporates the identified critical success factors for ECM. The proposed ECM framework provides practitioners with a change management process that incorporate ECM critical success factors, to guide in implementation of ECM projects.. This is anticipated to increase the chance of success for the ECM projects.