Change management in concurrent engineering from a parameter perspective

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the balance of cost between activities within a firm and activities between firms. Easier co-operation allows companies to focus on their core strengths, while forming relations with other firms to supply the other needed skills to bring a product to market. Design, in one firm or in a consortium, is iterative and does require change. The ability of companies to better manage engineering changes (ECs) during product development can decrease cost, shorten development time, and produce higher quality products. This paper concerns engineering change management (ECM) when product development involves more than one company. A review of ECM related papers finds a lack of those that address multi-company design efforts. This approach is based upon recent work in collaborative engineering, which uses elementary engineering decisions, captured as parameters, to drive the collaboration. The relationship between parameters determines the involvement of suppliers and engineering partners. This allows design partners to be informed early as to the impact of design changes. We describe the use of this approach in simultaneous ECM, its implementation within a product data management (PDM) system, and initial test results. We term this approach as 'intelligent' because it is based upon knowledge captured in the design process itself. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.