Crucial factors for effective engineering change management: An empirical study

An Engineering Change (EC) is an alternation made to parts, drawings or software that has already been released during the product design process. As an essential part of the product design process, EC has tremendous impacts on the budget, development schedule, quality of a product as well as the company's business reputation. Design for EC, including predicting and estimating the potential ECs, is a big problem faced by companies due to lack of knowledge reuse and insufficient systems support. Through studying the Engineering Change Management (ECM) practices in a well known telecommunication equipment provider in China, six categories of factors affecting the management of ECs, concerning aspects of organization, strategies, projects, markets, customers and products respectively, were identified. With a thorough understanding of how these factors can affect EC and, companies can better manage the knowledge in ECM to enhance their product development process.