Engineering change: an overview and perspective on the literature

Jarratt, T. A. W.; Eckert, Claudia; Caldwell, Nicholas; Clarkson, P. John

doi:10.1007/s00163-010-0097-y

Cited by 338 publications

(275 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Clarkson et al 2001;Eckert et al 2004Eckert et al , 2006Giffin et al 2009;Sosa 2008) and engineering change process design (e.g. Balcerak and Dale 1992;Dale 1982;Jarratt et al 2005Jarratt et al , 2011. Less research has appeared on its cross-section.…”

Section: Related Literature Research Motivation and Research Aimmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

Veldman

Alblas

2012

Res Eng Design

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Many capital good firms deliver products that are not strictly one-off, but instead share a certain degree of similarity with other deliveries. In the delivery of the product, they aim to balance stability and variety in their product design and processes. The issue of engineering change plays an important in how they manage to do so. Our aim is to gain more understanding into how capital good firms manage engineering change, design variety and process variety, and into the role of the product delivery strategies they thereby use. Product delivery strategies are defined as the type of engineering work that is done independent of an order and the specification freedom the customer has in the remaining part of the design. Based on the within-case and cross-case analysis of two capital good firms several mechanisms for managing engineering change, design variety and process variety are distilled. It was found that there exist different ways of (1) managing generic design information, (2) isolating large engineering changes, (3) managing process variety, (4) designing and executing engineering change processes. Together with different product delivery strategies these mechanisms can be placed within an archetypes framework of engineering change management. On one side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to open product delivery strategies, have some practices in place to investigate design reuse potential, isolate discontinuous engineering changes into the first deliveries of the product, employ 'probe and learn' process management principles in order to allow evolving insights to be accurately executed and have informal engineering change processes. On the other side of the spectrum capital good firms operate according to a closed product delivery strategy, focus on prevention of engineering changes based on design standards, need no isolation mechanisms for discontinuous engineering changes, have formal process management practices in place and make use of closed and formal engineering change procedures. The framework should help managers to (1) analyze existing configurations of product delivery strategies, product and process designs and engineering change management and (2) reconfigure any of these elements according to a 'misfit' derived from the framework. Since this is one of the few in-depth empirical studies into engineering change management in the capital good sector, our work adds to the understanding on the various ways in which engineering change can be dealt with.

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Section: Related Literature Research Motivation and Research Aimmentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

Veldman

Alblas

2012

Res Eng Design

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“…A major stream of change propagation analysis has been based on the view that the design change of one component can propagate through the interdependence relationships between components, requiring redesigns of many other components until all components can work together to perform the intended function Jarratt et al 2011;Hamraz et al 2013). Many change propagation studies use the component-based design structure matrix (DSM) to model the linkages between components in a complex product (Eppinger and Browning 2012).…”

Section: Change Propagation Through Component Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For comprehensive reviews of change propagation research, please refer to Jarratt et al (2011) and Hamraz et al (2013). In brief, changeability of components has been the main level of analysis in prior studies, despite the consideration of inter-component interactions.…”

Section: Change Propagation Through Component Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A simulation-based method to evaluate the impact of product architecture on product evolvability

Luo

2015

Res Eng Design

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Products evolve over time via the continual redesigns of interdependent components. Product architecture, which is embodied in the structure of interactions among components, influences the ability for the product to be subsequently evolved. Despite extensive studies of change propagation via inter-component connections, little is known about the specific influences of product architecture on product evolvability. Related metrics and methods to assess the evolvability of products with given architectures are also under-developed. This paper proposes a simulation-based method to assess the isolated effect of product architecture on product evolvability by analyzing a design structure matrix. We define product evolvability as the ability of the product's design to subsequently generate heritable performance-improving variations, and propose a quantitative measure for it. We demonstrate the proposed method by using it to investigate a wide spectrum of model-generated DSMs representing products with varied architectures, and show that modularity and inter-component influence cycles promote product evolvability. Our primary contribution is a repeatable method to assess and compare alternative product architectures for architecture selection or redesign for evolvability. A second contribution is the simulation-based evidence about the impacts of two particular product architectural patterns on product evolvability. Both contributions aim to aid in designing for evolvability.

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“…Many in-depth company case studies have been conducted to understand the current practices and issues of ECM in order to derive the needs for future development (Jarratt et al 2011). As a result, a variety of frameworks and tools aimed at aiding investigation, analysis, prediction of change propagation, and the management of ECs have been developed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Industrial evaluation of FBS Linkage – a method to support engineering change management

Hamraz

Clarkson

2015

Journal of Engineering Design

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Engineering changes (ECs) are raised throughout the product life cycle and their management can determine the commercial success of products. A well-established method to support engineering change management (ECM) is the change prediction method (CPM). The function-behaviour-structure (FBS) linkage method enhances CPM with an FBS scheme and allows more detailed modelling and analysis of ECs. The goal of this paper is to provide an industrial evaluation of the FBS Linkage method. For that purpose, we provide first an overview of the FBS Linkage method, before applying it to a diesel engine design and evaluating it by a group of 10 experienced engineers from the diesel engine manufacturer. Overall, the engineers favoured the FBS Linkage method and ranked it on average 3.7 out of 5.0 against a set of 25 different requirements for ECM methods. The evaluation underlines the benefits of the method in terms of a systematic way for capturing, explaining and transferring knowledge about the product and effects of ECs on it. Identified improvement areas include more guidelines on the scope of the method, reduction of the effort required to build FBS Linkage models, and an integration of the method into other applied systems.

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Engineering change: an overview and perspective on the literature

Cited by 338 publications

References 65 publications

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

Managing design variety, process variety and engineering change: a case study of two capital good firms

A simulation-based method to evaluate the impact of product architecture on product evolvability

Industrial evaluation of FBS Linkage – a method to support engineering change management

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