Question

1. Why is it important to establish and strictly define procedures for incorporating engineering changes and revisions into a database?

Answer 1

The engineering changes which are carried out across many organization are referred as ECN which referred as Electronic change notification which have a unique number and contains detailed information about the change.

This process is carried out through a defined procedure which starts from review to final Implementation and monitoring of the change.

There is a strict demand of following the change procedure for incorporating the change. If the procedure is being not followed it will leads to:

1.Various confusions among different stakeholders which are responsible for change.

2. Of the procedure is not followed as per the defined protocols, it can leads to increase in the Scrap and wastes.

3.Without having proper change review and notification it can leads to failures in the product and ultimately leads to customer dissatisfaction.

4.Without having proper follow of Change protocol it will be difficult for the team to implement the change.

5.There is mandatory need to regularly update the database of the change management, failing in which leads to ineffective communication of the change and changes cannot be incorporated throughout the overall organization and details of the change cannot be accurately clarified and confusion for the change still exists.

A common software which is used by many organization for this change Management is Done by PLM and Windchill system.

Let's understand this with an example;

A chinese Company XYZ have a manufacturing unit in India. Indian manufacturing unit observed one major failure in design and want to change the design in drawings. For this Indian team raised one ECN for the same.But not followed the protocol and missed to update the changes in the PLM systems.now Indian team will address the change and know about the change but china team don't aware about the change and thus continuing the supply or export of old design parts to india team.This leads to confusions among various stakeholders responsible for the change and also it may become necessary to reject the whole parts and thus which leads to increase in the Scrap and ultimately a loss.