Engineering change management (ECM) is a structured approach to the documentation, management, application and evaluation of engineering changes (ECs) throughout the entire product life cycle (PLC). ECM is an essential component of product life cycle management (PLM) from conceptualization and design, to production and maintenance and through eventual obsolescence and discontinuation.
Engineering change management (ECM) in modern manufacturing require process optimization
Having an effective ECM process can help manufacturers succeed as production is globalized, product life cycles are shortened and there is greater concern about product quality, reliability, and safety. Process mining and execution management can help create that effective ECM process.
What is engineering change management?
Engineering change management (ECM) is a structured approach to the documentation, management, application and evaluation of engineering changes (ECs) throughout the entire product life cycle (PLC). ECM is an essential component of product life cycle management (PLM) from conceptualization and design, to production and maintenance and through eventual obsolescence and discontinuation.
Why is engineering change management in the automotive industry important?
Few modern consumer products have as complex a supply chain and manufacturing process as automobiles. Cars and trucks have tens of thousands of parts, sourced for thousands of suppliers around the world. Common examples of automotive engineering part changes are quality improvements (like smoothing the rough edge on a door handle), cost saving efforts (replacing a painted component with a black component) or safety fixes (addressing long-term corrosion of battery cables that leads to a loss of engine power). Changing even a single part to address these or other issues can affect dozens of other parts, the assembly process, and the vehicle’s overall function. Therefore, engineering changes must be carefully planned, executed and documented.
As noted above, ECs must also meet specific business objectives, such as reducing costs, improving engineering change order (ECO) quality, ensuring quality and mitigating risk and streamlining communication. Within each of these objective categories, manufacturers should look at the following key metrics:
- Reducing costs: Overall product costs or cost of goods sold (COGS), excess and obsolete inventory, rework and scrap or service costs
- Improve ECO quality: Reduce cost per EC, shorten ECO cycle time, improve master data quality and reduce the rework rate
- Ensure quality and mitigate risk: Improve produce performance, ensure commercialization, track ECO critical path elements/impact, and increase the number of successful ECOs
- Streamline communication: Improve ECO cycle time, supplier performance and customer satisfaction through better on-time delivery (OTD), product performance, etc.