ECM: Unlocking the Era of Personalization

We’ve been overwhelmed by social networks and our digital devices, bringing us to an environment of personalization — we want what we want, when we want.?

We have become critics and creators

For many businesses, demand for personalization runs counter to the dominant model of providing high-volume products and services through mass distribution. The move from mass production to mass personalization can have a significant effect on costs. There has to be a net benefit in order to pursue this business model .??

How do you determine how many options are necessary for a product or service to feel unique while still remaining profitable??

Batches of One is the target, it has to be and to not be will always leave an organization susceptible to disruption. Now we are developing the capabilities to measure specifically what each individual consumer wants. We are now in a position to link processes and resources to provide it, through manufacturing and distribution technologies.?

Furthermore, we can now postpone production until the last possible moment to allow for personalization and in so doing, reduce inventory levels and improve plant efficiency.??

It starts with Engineering Change Management (ECM) and the associated Requests (ECRs), which for many are a normality, but for many more, a new world in which to adapt to.?

Many ETO companies use common practices for handling ECRs, while Engineering Change Management (ECM) Tools are infrequently used. Few reasons exist for the lack of computer-based tools, change communication and impact assessment tools, change reduction and front-loading tools, and design tools.??

This suggests that there's vast room for improvement in ETO companies when it comes to ECM.??

The ECM Framework

Engineering Changes (ECs) are essential for improving product design, modifying products to ever moving requirements and improving product manufacturability.?

ECs can be understood as modifications to the structure, behavior and function of a product or part that has already been released during the design process.?

There are two ECs:

1. those coming from the product itself, such as mistakes and errors
2. those initiated externally, such as customer personalization changes???

Any change can cause an impact across your organization from design and engineering to procurement, production and post-production, having an affect on your cost?

Implementation of ECM has been found to reduce the cost, planning and interruption impacts of ECs.??

The ECM goal is to reduce ECs, through the effective timing of ECs, to implement ECs efficiently and to continuously learn during the process.To achieve these, a variety of ECM practices and tools have been developed.?

Customer orders in the ETO environment are usually coordinated on a project basis. ETO products are essentially a one-of-a-kind, however can range from those that are built on a base of existing sub-solutions to completely new designs.?

• Product mix, volumes and specifications are reliant on customers and difficult to forecast.?
• Production processes are uncertain in terms of specifications and durations.?
• Overlap of design, engineering, purchasing, and production processes, often used in the ETO environment to reduce the delivery time, leads to incomplete product data being exchanged.??

Unlike make-to-stock and mass production environments, where ECs are mainly managed before the start of production, ETO companies cannot postpone ECs to the next production run since the production is discontinuous. This is further complicated by the fact that ECs are implemented in an uncertain environment – with missing and incomplete information exchanged between company functions and suppliers, and uncertain specifications of production processes and resources needed.??

ECM Approaches

A number of ECM strategies have been developed over the years:??

1. The ‘less’ strategy:?targets reducing the number of ECs.?
2. The ‘earlier’ strategy:?targets early detection and implementation of changes and is motivated by the fact that the later a change is implemented, the higher the cost of its implementation.?
3. The ‘effective’ strategy:?targets accurate assessment of ECs to ensure that they are necessary and beneficial. Here, uneconomic and senseless changes should be filtered out.?
4. The ‘efficient’ strategy:?targets the implementation of ECs by making the best use of resources.?
5. The ‘better’ strategy:?targets reviewing and evaluating ECs after they have been implemented – assessing whether the initial impact estimation was correct, identifying mistakes made at each ECM stage, and preventing similar mistakes in the future.

The ECM macro-process?

It’s recommended that companies have a clear process of organizing EC activities including steps that companies should follow when implementing:?

1. a request for the change must be made, and all necessary information about the change needs to be captured
2. assess the impacts of the EC
3. possible solutions to the change request should be identified, and the impact of each solution in terms of cost and time must be assessed. However, in reality time and sometimes an obvious solution prevents this. The best solution can be chosen and approved.
4. when it comes to efficient EC implementation, two main strategies are suggested: implementation of ECs by urgency, and EC batching.?
5. At the final step of the EC process, the implemented EC should be formally reviewed to assess whether the initial estimations were correct, and the knowledge gained during the EC implementation process should be gathered and centrally stored for analysis and use in future EC implementations.??

The importance of integration between design, engineering and production, as well as integration with suppliers, especially in today’s logistical times of port bottlenecks and reduced workforces.?

Successful integration helps to reduce, front-load and implement changes more effectively and efficiently. A common platform for collaboration and single-source-of-truth for all design and engineering data.??

Among the cultural best practices are the involvement of manufacturing and suppliers early in the design and engineering process for change reduction. Establishing cross-functional teams to work on ECs ensure optimum decision making and long-term cost efficiencies. These teams should consist of representatives from different disciplines, such as design, engineering, production, purchasing, planning and sales. These teams should have a responsible coordinator of EC activities and separate meetings dedicated to working on ECs.??

Today’s reality however is holding separate meetings dedicated to working on an EC is rare. Thus the need for a single-source-of-truth platform for ongoing collaboration.??

The ECM Tools

A range of Product Lifecycle software tools are here to support ECM:?

• Change Reduction
• Design
• Change Communication?
• Impact Assessment

Such software is used to track and document changes throughout the product lifecycle, support EC-related documentation flow, capture and reuse knowledge on ECs, support inter and intra-company communication and collaboration on ECs, and virtually test products under occurring changes.?

Change reduction tools

The Change Reduction tools focus on the basis of changes occurring, not necessarily because the customer requirements change at the sale, but because the organization did not understand their requirements in the first place. To avoid these kinds of changes, Quality Function Deployment can be used.?Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a process and set of tools used to effectively define customer requirements and convert them into detailed engineering specifications and plans to produce the products that fulfil those requirements. QFD is used to translate customer requirements (or Voice of the Customer - VOC) into measurable design targets and drive them from the assembly level down through the sub-assembly, component and production process levels. QFD methodology provides a defined set of matrices utilized to facilitate this progression, as it helps translate customers’ wants and needs into product engineering characteristics.

Failure, Mode & Effects & Analysis (FMEA) is a method that identifies, prioritizes and reduces potential problems in the given product. If carried out early in the design process, FMEA reduces the number of internal ECs occurring due to errors.?

Design tools

Different product design tools can be used to reduce the number of ECs. These include Design for Manufacturing (DFM), Design for Changeability (DFC) and design freeze. Often, after design drawings are passed to the manufacturing and assembly engineers, design problems are encountered, thereby requiring changes to be made. DFM prevents the occurrence of such emergent changes at late stages of the product lifecycle.?

DFC is aimed towards designing systems and products so that future configuration changes can be easily and rapidly implemented or avoided altogether.??

Modular design, in which modules are interconnected through a set of standard interfaces or rules, is probably the most widespread approach. As long as designers obey these rules and do not change interfaces, they have substantial freedom to try out different designs inside the module. As a result modules can evolve autonomously, without altering the whole system.?

Another important approach enabling changeability is platform design. A product platform is defined as a set of constant parameters, features and components, from which a stream of derivative product variants can be efficiently produced and developed. The Platform is engineered or produced to stock, and differentiated features and parts are added when the order is known.??

Lastly, design freeze can be used to limit the number of changes that occur Design freeze is a point in the design activity when a formal stop is placed on the evolution of the design. After that, the design is handed over to production, and the product can be built with no further changes.??

Change Communication and Impact Assessment tools are intended to identify dependencies in a system in order to assess the impact of change propagation. Several tools have been proposed in this area, most of which include a model (matrix, network, graph) to represent dependencies between components of a product, as well as a technique to predict or analyze the impact of a change propagation. The most established method is the Change Prediction Method (CPM). The CPM is used to break up a product into subsystems in order to create a Design Structure Matrix (DSM). Further, experts estimate a change propagation between subsystems and assess both its likelihood and impact.?

Andrew Sparrow

I drive Product Innovation & Optimization projects for companies using cutting-edge tech & software solutions to keep them at the forefront of the customer-centric 4IR

I blog, vlog & podcast passionately about our need to innovate & thrive, about managing the product lifecycle (PLM) & ever improving smarter manufacturing (MES/MOM/Digital Manufacturing).

I love & thrive in working with some of the world's largest companies such as Airbus, Capgemini, Dassault Systemes, Ericsson, JLR, TOTAL, Siemens, Sony, Subsea7 & Unilever, to name a few

I'm a big people-person & have spent my life meeting as many people & cultures as I can. At my last count, I am lucky enough to have visited & done business in over 55 countries

#plm #ecm #changemanagement