Engineering Change Management Research Articles

Agility in Engineering Change Management: Navigating Complexities of Emergent Changes in PLM

Agility in Engineering Change Management: Navigating Complexities of Emergent Changes in PLM

From Engineering Change to Enterprise Change Management: An empirical study on CM2 processes in the automotive industry

Companies need to respond to changing market requirements with product and process improvements. In order to better meet the needs of consumers, technical changes must be made within the product lifecycle of products. This can, for example, change the product's shape, ft or function. Engineering Change Management (ECM) processes are an elementary part of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and support handling these changes. ECM ensures that changes are assessed, communicated, coordinated, and implemented in time. The present research is based on a case study in an automotive company analysing the way of working within current ECM implementations against the CM2 framework proposed by Wu et al. [1]. Based on the comparison of qualitative interviews and company documents, the analysis shows deviations in the ECM process, especially regarding the implementation of changes in the plants. We suggest expanding the ECM process framework towards an Enterprise Change Management, including master data change in the IT systems and involving all relevant departments to implement the change successfully in the plant(s). Thus, we propose expanding the existing CM2 framework to inform ECM middle-range theory. In addition, recommendations for a successful ECM implementation are deduced from the comparison.

Towards a Universal Model of Engineering Change Management

AbstractThe paper deals with the issue of engineering change management (ECM). ECM has received much less attention in the literature than general change management. Moreover, due to their specifics (complexity and multifaceted nature), hitherto developed ECM models are difficult to implement in companies. The paper aims to develop a simplified, universal, and hence easily applicable model of ECM. We based our assumptions on a case study of a manufacturing company with low-volume production, representing a high-mix type, posing the following research question: how to improve the ECM process to make it simpler and more quickly adaptable in companies with the analyzed type of production when compared to the existing models? To answer this question, an exploratory qualitative study was conducted in late 2021/early 2022 using in-depth personal interviews. The research sample included 31 employees involved in ECM processes. Conventional qualitative content analysis was the primary technique for analyzing and interpreting the data. The study identified gaps and bottlenecks in the existing ECM model. On this basis, a proposal for a new ECM model was developed, distinguished by its simplicity and versatility (it can be implemented in companies operating in various industries). Particular emphasis was placed on ensuring the flow of information and circulation of technical documentation between the departments involved and clarifying the role of the change administrator. The paper sheds new light on how to implement engineering changes in organizations and has considerable application value.

Asset administration shell-based engineering change management process: Challenges and ways forward

Engineering change management (ECM) is a complex process that requires extensive documentation work and dedicated communication between the parties involved. In addition, the increasing complexity of products and the various fluctuations in market conditions lead to a significant increase in the quantity of engineering changes which are reflected throughout the stages of a product's life cycle. Recent studies show the lack of standards that enable the exchange of information resulting from the interaction of the actors involved in the change process. The advancing digitalization in industrial production has led to the establishment of the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) as a concrete implementation of the digital twin concept. In this regard, the recently published standards on AAS allow it to be considered as a candidate for improving the current ECM situation. Based on this consideration, in this paper we first present the challenges of the ECM process not only through an overview of the current literature and standards, but also based on observations from experts in industrial ECM processes. Afterwards, we present the potential of AAS for solution development with regard to the challenges identified for ECM. A concrete concept for streamlining the ECM process with the help of AAS concludes this contribution.

Concept and implementation path for model-based impact analysis in product development

Engineers must evaluate the effects of changes in requirements during product design. Due to strongly linked design, production, and operation networks, these effects have tremendous consequences in cross-company engineering change and configuration management. Implications for development effort, the degree of fulfillment of requirements, functional costs, and follow-up costs in product variants and each system lifecycle stage (e.g., production, validation, and maintenance) must be assessed. Today, this is done without sufficient ICT (information and communication technology) support. In the German research project ImPaKT, reliable answers are to be inferred as to how technical and organizational changes to a partial model affect a complex, interdisciplinary overall system in an ICT-supported way. Therefore, a reference architecture is created using a Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) approach and a common parameter space. Adapted by corporate networks with their heterogeneous product and application lifecycle management (PLM/ALM) landscapes, homogeneous MBSE networks are created. The ImPaKT technology alliance is convergently developing existing ICT base technologies to enable engineering change management, linking isolated solutions and creating standards for handling changes to develop products faster and cost-efficiently and reduce risks.

Part Change Management: A Case Study on Automotive Engineering and Production; Domestic and International Perspectives

AbstractDue to interest in aspects such as process, strategies, and tools of engineering changes expressed in a literature review, a case study was done on a major automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to assess the perceived quality of its part engineering change management process and supporting system through its employees’ eyes. A combination of 12 interviews lasting 12 h and 46 written surveys was used to capture the views of participants from all major functions found at the research and development (R&D) headquarters of the OEM: Purchasing, Production, Development, and one group consisting of all other functions (“Other”). Statistical analysis was performed to identify statistically significant differences between employee perceptions of an engineering change management system among different departments, amount of use, and years of use. It was found that statistically significant differences exist in terms of understanding the usability of the system between different departments and also between different years of experience.

Managing Engineering Change within the Paradigm of Product Lifecycle Management

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 gaps between the extents of conformance to success factors have been identified as extent of integration, standardization, versatility of application, support of existing systems, and the extent of product lifecycle management support.

Data-Based Stakeholder Identification in Technical Change Management

The efficient and effective handling of technical changes in product and production is seen as an important factor for the long-term success of manufacturing companies. Within the associated processes, the engineering and manufacturing change management, the identification and involvement of all relevant stakeholders, i.e., departments and employees, plays an essential role. Overlooking relevant stakeholders can lead to unforeseen impacts, such as production stops or further necessary changes, and can cause unforseen increased costs. In particular, in large companies, this task is complex and error-prone due to the high number of changes and departments involved, as well as the abundant variety of changes that can take place. Therefore, this contribution introduces an approach for stakeholder identification in technical change management, which allows the automated identification of relevant stakeholders at the beginning of the reactive phases of the change management process. The approach describes all necessary steps from data preparation to the evaluation of the obtained classification models. It is based on a text-classification approach and focuses in particular on the additional integration of expert knowledge to increase model quality. The approach has been successfully applied in cooperation with a German automotive company, and the obtained model quality has been compared to an expert-based classification.

SECPON: Analysis of Engineering Change Processes for Manufacturing Companies

The problem of process models in engineering change management is their static approach, which hinders enterprises from using them in daily business. The SECPON process is a standardized implementation process for engineering changes with the additional benefit of enabling users to adjust this process according to the specific requirements of their company and product. The indication that there are influencing factors on change processes is innovative for the theory of engineering change management. Additionally, special process steps for certain branches, such as the food industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the aeronautical industry, and the railway industry, are integrated. Due to the wide variety of literature and survey participants, the reference process is universally applicable. The deductive–inductive research results enable business users to apply more accurate and structured engineering change processes. Researchers profit from the successful new approach to engineering change management with the adaptive process model.

Research on Engineering Change Management in Construction Engineering Management

Research on Engineering Change Management in Construction Engineering Management

Engineering Change Risk Assessment: Quantitative and qualitative change characterization

Currently, computer-aided design (CAD) systems are very important for the design of any engineering products. CAD systems have undergone enormous progress. They are becoming more and more intelligent and automated. However, those systems still need improvement and still have flaws that need to be corrected in order to improve and develop the productivity and efficiency of the design process. Mechanical products are often complex and composed of multiple components so, consequently, an Engineering Change (EC) that affects a module or a single component will certainly influence the rest of the assembly. This phenomenon is called Change Propagation (CP). Therefore, in order to propagate a change that affects an assembly component easily, it is important to predict the Change Propagation Path and the impact of this modification on the rest of the assembly components. Hence, CP becomes an easy task. This paper focuses on the risk assessment of an engineering change, in order to enhance the predictive capacity of engineering change management methods. In fact, a full analysis must be made to measure the real impact of such modifications as well as their feasibility. To this end, the authors proposed a matrix-based approach, which results in a Risk Matrix. This is the product of the Relationships Matrix and the Influences Matrix which are constructed based on the data extracted at an early stage. In fact, the CAD assembly model contains a lot of important information that is extracted using Application Programming Interface (API).

МОДЕЛЬ ПРОЦЕССОВ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ ИНЖЕНЕРНЫМИ ИЗМЕНЕНИЯМИ В ИЗДЕЛИЯХ НА ПРОМЫШЛЕННОМ ПРЕДПРИЯТИИ

The issues of the influence of engineering changes in the industrial enterprise products on the goods competitiveness and the enterprise itself are considered, internal and external causes of changes are identified, and the need to formalize the engineering change management system is substantiated. A control model is proposed, which is based on three control loops: engineering changes, product competitiveness and manufacturability, and interaction with the external environment. When concretizing the goals, objectives and parameters of engineering changes at an enterprise a generalized model can help to identify a system of adequate measures designed to create conditions for the enterprise short-term and long-term development while maintaining the competitiveness of manufactured products and the economic stability of the growth as a whole.

An interpretable machine learning approach for engineering change management decision support in automotive industry

As an essential part of the Product Life Cycle (PLC), the time-to-market of products is influenced by Engineering Change Management (ECM) processes. An Engineering Change (EC) is part of a formal process in industry to describe, rationalize, determine, release components for final production or make changes to already released design. It includes information about shape, functionality, production location, cost, and other relevant data entries. The duration from creation to the approval of a change request can take weeks or even months, without apparent reasons for the bottleneck. In addition, changes to one component can lead to unexpected chain reactions to other components. Therefore, identifying impacts of changes is challenging for all Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). To address the above challenges, the authors have developed and built a machine learning-based decision support solution in this article. Community detection and stacking algorithms were applied to build more robust models. Impacts and lead time of Engineering Change Requests (ECRs) are predicted and explained by Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME). A case study was conducted on real-world data from an automotive company. After evaluation with industry experts, the solution approach was proved to have positive contributions to increasing the quality, efficiency, and transparency of the existing ECM processes.

Requirement-driven engineering change management in product design

Product design change is often triggered by external factors. As product is composed of various components and complex relations among them, predicting change propagation of the upstream component and subsequent influence on product design change is a great challenge. In current researches, most of the methods for engineering change (EC) prediction are focused on a single index, e.g., cycle or workload. Besides, logical relations between product components are rarely considered in the product design change. In this paper, an evaluation model of change propagation incorporating multiple indices and logical relations is proposed to manage the ECs. The primary result of this work is the provision of a development support to efficiently acquire the optimal design change solution when a changed requirement is proposed. Requirement is regarded as the source of design change. Requirement-component relation is established, and component-component relation is constructed in terms of interface types between components. Logical relations (i.e., AND, OR, XOR) between downstream components are proposed and the interface types are applied to judge the logical relation. Requirement-component relation, logical relation between components are applied to generate the change propagation paths. Then ant colony optimization (ACO) is used to optimize the generated change propagation paths and the optimal design change solution is demonstrated to the designers automatically. Finally, a prototype software system is developed and a case study is detailed.

Improving engineering change management by introducing a standardised description for engineering changes for the automotive wiring harness

Engineering change management is a key part in the development of products that requires a lot of resources and time. A key problem is the lack of a shared ontology to describe engineering changes. This creates problems, additional effort and hinders the digitalisation of the engineering change management. This is especially true for the development of the automotive wiring harness where a low degree of automation together with the occurrence of many changes in a multi-variant system poses a big challenge. A description that is unambiguous, comprehensive and coherent is needed. The research presented in this paper tackles this problem. A standardised description for the engineering change management for the automotive wiring harness is introduced in this publication. The authors outline the approach that has been used to create a systematic description. The validation of the standardised description is based on two approaches: a case study of a development project and an ongoing development project. The validation shows that 94% of all engineering changes can be described in the proposed standardised way. Concepts where the standardised descriptions can be used to improve the engineering change process are outlined at the end of the paper. The paper thereby presents a way that directly improves the engineering change process and the product development process. It enables the further improvement of the engineering change management by providing a basis for an automatic processing, evaluation and implementation of engineering changes.

A process mining-based approach for stakeholder identification in manufacturing and engineering change management

The efficient handling of engineering and manufacturing changes is an essential requirement for the long-term success of companies. In the change management process, the identification of affected employees and departments is essential to generate and disseminate all necessary information. Therefore, this contribution introduces an approach for data-driven stakeholder identification in change management to support change coordinators. It is based on historical change process data and uses process mining for analysis. Additionally, it shows how past process versions can be considered in the analysis. The approach was evaluated in cooperation with a medical technology company.

Product design change propagation in automotive supply chain considering product life cycle

Changes in a product are necessary to guarantee high quality product and to remain competitive in the market. Engineering Change Management process ensures planning and implementation of changes effectively. Product design changes may be required in each step of product life cycle from its design to decline phase. Different tools are developed to study change propagation impact. Product architecture and change propagation path selection are the main focus areas found in methodologies developed for change management in recent years. Still, the manufacturing industry is facing challenges to control changes in implementation phase. A case study is conducted in an automotive company to understand perceived effect of product design change in manufacturing environment. Results of case study draws attention towards concerns reported, starting from raw material planning to disposition of changed part and the need for prediction of change in implementation phase across the functions, as well as in complete supply chain of automotive industry. Change propagation tools can be, if needed, extended from design phase to manufacturing environment.

Reducing the uncertainty in engineering change management using historical data and simulation modelling: a process twin concept

Engineering change management (ECM) makes up a large portion of overall product development effort and provokes significant uncertainty in planning and executing the product development operations. By enabling better planned ECMs, practitioners can improve overall project management. This work introduces the concept of the digital twin for the ECM process to enable its continuous quantitative assessment and improvement of engineering process planning. For this, we bring forward two key contributions: the concept of the framework for ECM process simulation and analysis, and the approach to refine the ECM modelling parameters using historical data and thus reduce associated uncertainty. This work proposes that by using past information, we can improve the accuracy of ECM modelling and enable more precise predictions on process lead time and its standard deviation. We conclude the article with an outlook for further research pointing at the current limitations and challenges.

Robust optimization of information flows in global production networks using multi-method simulation and surrogate modelling

Low information exchange in global production networks results in long response time to disruption and negative performance impact. Digitalization enables a more intensive information exchange. This paper analyses the performance of order management, quality problem resolution and engineering change management in production networks with respect to different disruptions and information flows. Cause-effect relationships are revealed based on a multi-method simulation model and statistical experiments. Using surrogate modelling and robust optimization, a target picture for information exchange is determined. The benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a case study for the production of metal-plastic parts for the automotive supplier industry.

The differential practices of project management offices for supporting new product development in high-tech companies

The article, through presenting a company's project management office (PMO), argues about practices a PMO must establish for supporting new product development (NPD) in high-technology companies. A holistic case-study was performed where data gathered comes from interviews, direct and participant observation, and document analysis. The practices identified differ from the current literature about the PMO functions. The whole set of functions performed by the described PMO responds to specific processes an NPD project asks for. It begins monitoring, analysing, and systematising product requirements to develop project schedules. During project execution, it supports configuration management through engineering change management. When prototyping, it carries on provisions of the necessary materials and subcontracted processes for assembling and testing. These PMO functions are compared to the current PMO literature. It is suggested that the functions undertaken by the PMO can enhance the theoretical options for structuring PMOs in NPD-based companies avoiding mimicry dysfunctions.