Engineering Change Management in Distruted Environment with PDM / PLM Support

Globalization has dramatically changed the way in which products are produced by manufactures of all sizes. Small to medium sized organizations are now just as likely to engage in global outsourcing projects as large multinational teams (Tosse, 2005). Global distributed teams need to effectively communicate and collaborate throughout the entire product development process to produce innovative products of the highest quality in the shortest period of time. In industry, engineering change management (ECM) is recognized as a problem that receives too little attention relative to its importance. Wright’s (Wright, 1997) conclusion is that from the manufacturing perspective ECM is a disturbance obstructing smooth product manufacture, but such a perspective ignores ECM’s capacity to provide the incentive for product improvement. Wright’s conclusion is that a number of coordinated research programs are required to establish the ground rules for maximizing the product design benefits from EC activity. Many and especially late ECs are very costly for any development project. ECs consume one third to one half of the total engineering capacity and represent 20 to 50 % of total tool costs (Terwiesch & Loch, 1999). The key contributors to long EC lead times are: complex approval process, snowballing changes, scarce capacity and organizational issues. Loch (Loch & Terwiesch, 1999) analyzed the process of administering engineering chain orders within a large vehicle development project. Despite the tremendous time pressure in development projects, EC process lead times are in the order of several weeks, months and even over one year (Loch & Terwiesch, 1999). A detailed analysis has shown a low proportion of value-added time in the EC process – less than 8.5 %. An EC spends most of its lifetime waiting for further processing. Loch suggests the following improvement strategies in order to reduce EC lead time: flexible capacity, balanced workloads, merged tasks and sharing resources (pooling).