When should design changes be allowed to accumulate

Engineering changes are ubiquitous in development projects. Changes are unpredictable in terms of when they occur, but also in terms of their nature, where they occur and how they propagate through linkages between subsystems and design activities. In practice, changes which arise unexpectedly during a project are often put aside and allowed to accumulate. Accumulating changes and then executing them together can reduce overheads such as task setup time and testing after performing the rework; however, it can also create additional work because, while changes wait to be processed, tasks are done which may have to be revisited when the changes are eventually processed. We discuss some of the issues involved in deciding how to process changes and introduce a simulation model which can be used to identify the most appropriate processing approach for a given project. The simulation model is applied to a case study of an electronic product, and general implications are highlighted from the results.

[1]  Thomas Gärtner,et al.  Simulation of Product Change Effects on the Duration of Development Processes Based on the DSM , 2008 .

[2]  Naveed Ahmad,et al.  DEVELOPMENT AND EVALUATION OF A TOOL TO ESTIMATE THE IMPACT OF DESIGN CHANGE , 2010 .

[3]  Pj Clarkson,et al.  CAN CHANGE PREDICTION HELP PRIORITISE REDESIGN WORK IN FUTURE ENGINEERING SYSTEMS , 2010 .

[4]  Marin D. Guenov,et al.  Methods for engineering change propagation analysis , 2006 .

[5]  Claudia Eckert,et al.  Aspects of a better understanding of changes , 2001 .

[6]  Alex H. B. Duffy,et al.  The nature of engineering change in a complex product development cycle , 2009 .

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

[8]  Young B. Moon,et al.  A framework for managing engineering change propagation , 2009 .

[9]  Rui He,et al.  Design structure matrix-based Engineering Change management for product development , 2008 .

[10]  Claudia Eckert,et al.  Change Propagation Analysis in Complex Technical Systems , 2009 .

[11]  Christoph H. Loch,et al.  Accelerating the process of engineering change orders: capacity and congestion effects , 1999 .

[12]  Steven D. Eppinger,et al.  A Model-Based Framework to Overlap Product Development Activities , 1997 .

[13]  Steven D. Eppinger,et al.  Integration analysis of product decompositions , 1994 .

[14]  Tyson R. Browning,et al.  Applying the design structure matrix to system decomposition and integration problems: a review and new directions , 2001, IEEE Trans. Engineering Management.