An Approach to Assess Engineering Change Effort Retrospectively Utilizing Past Engineering Change Information.

The competitiveness of companies is nowadays highly dependent on an efficient product development. Shorter time to market, increased competition as well as accelerated market dynamics can be handled well by a continuous improvement in development efficiency. Hence, improving the development performance can have a big impact on the time to market. However, an increasing number of resources must be assigned to the management of engineering changes. The management of changes strongly influences the resources available for the actual design process. Furthermore, the increasing complexity of technical systems as well as the organization affects the engineering change situation and further induces change complexity. This paper therefore introduces an approach to retrospectively assess engineering change information to identify areas for reducing the change workload. It therefore introduces a procedure to guide users through the process of the assessment. In addition, it suggests indicators to evaluate the change situation regarding the induced workload. Finally, the approach is applied in a use case to investigate an engineering change data set.