Retrospective Analysis of Engineering Change Iterations - A Case Study on Reducing Engineering Changes by Defining Target Values for Engineering Design

In the development of technical systems, engineering changes nowadays are more a rule than an exception and can take a big share of the overall capacity of a design project. Thus, reducing avoidable changes can have a huge impact the overall project performance. Hence, knowledge of companies about change iterations can reveal performance lacks in development projects. This paper therefore presents an industrial case study using past change information to reduce engineering change iterations. Hence, it briefly introduces the applied method and describes the procedure to reduce change iterations as well as the findings within the company’s environment in detail.

[1]  Helmut Krcmar,et al.  A Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) Approach for Extracting Causes of Iterations in Engineering Change Orders , 2011 .

[2]  Steven C. Wheelwright,et al.  Managing New Product and Process Development: Text and Cases , 1992 .

[3]  P. Clarkson,et al.  Predicting change propagation in complex design , 2004 .

[4]  Johan Malmqvist,et al.  A Comparative Study of Engineering Change Management in Three Swedish Engineering Companies , 1998 .

[5]  Udo Lindemann,et al.  Exploring Differences between Average and Critical Engineering Changes: Survey Results from Denmark , 2012 .

[6]  C. Köhler.  Technische Produktänderungen - Analyse und Beurteilung von Lösungsmöglichkeiten auf Basis einer Erweiterung des CPM/PDD-Ansatzes , 2009 .

[7]  A. Griffin.  PDMA Research on New Product Development Practices: Updating Trends and Benchmarking Best Practices , 1997 .

[8]  Wolfgang Beitz,et al.  Engineering Design: A Systematic Approach , 1984 .

[9]  P. John Clarkson,et al.  A Holistic Categorization Framework for Literature on Engineering Change Management , 2013, Syst. Eng..

[10]  P. John Clarkson,et al.  Industrial evaluation of FBS Linkage – a method to support engineering change management , 2015 .

[11]  Robert G. Cooper,et al.  Perspective: The Stage‐Gate® Idea‐to‐Launch Process—Update, What's New, and NexGen Systems* , 2008 .

[12]  K. Ehrlenspiel,et al.  Integrierte Produktentwicklung - Denkabläufe, Methodeneinsatz, Zusammenarbeit , 2009 .