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

Abstract

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.

Process Alignment for Sustainable Product Development: The Essential Role of Supplier and Customer Involvement Processes

“…Concerning the customer perspective various authors mention the importance of customer empowerment in product development in terms of their engagement to create ideas for new product designs; and their permission to select the product designs to be produced e.g., [34]. Moreover, the type of customer involvement affects the type of engineering work that is conducted and impacts the overall product delivery strategy of a firm [35]. Customer involvement can vary from very limited involvement, to very intensively involvement, i.e., having lots of influence on the design decisions of a company.…”

Contexto General del Mercado Eléctrico Internacional para Transformadores de Potencia

“…Hobday [3], considera al Sistema Eléctrico y sus componentes como un producto complejo, entre las características del TP sobresalen "costos elevados, productos personalizados, la dinámica de la innovación y la naturaleza de la coordinación industrial pueden diferir de otro tipo de productos especialmente los básicos de bajo costo, producidos en masa, basados en componentes estándar" [3], se entregan pequeños números de productos individualizados a cada cliente y, en consecuencia, el diseño genérico subyacente de cada familia se revisa continuamente durante la entrega de los productos, como lo indica Vedman [4], otras características como su eficiencia y confiabilidad, Romero [5] considera que son determinadas por las bajas tasas de degradación y diseños que garantizan una larga vida en operación normal de más de 40 años lo colocan como un activo físico.…”

A study on the Requirements to Support the Accurate Prediction of Engineering Change Propagation

“…On the other hand, change modeling for complex engineering systems can be useful in providing insights on how changes evolve. Requirements for change can arise due to design innovation and error rectification [Eckert et al., ; Shankar et al., ; Veldman and Alblas, ] and the requirements themselves can change during the design process [Morkos, Shankar, and Summers, ; Fernandes et al., ]. Although the FBS model is sufficient to describe past occurrences of engineering change propagation with respect to change requirements (see Section ), it is important to note that predicting future engineering change propagation requires the consideration of another piece of information—design options.…”