| Change Management |
|
Every project is affected by changes. In other words “there can be no improvements without changes ”. Changes are triggered by the design process, by cost-reducing measures, additional requirements and by a multitude of outside influences. This is why changes have to be monitored permanently.
If your company operates in a dynamic environment the objective for target costs, process plans and performance have to be managed by an effective change management which offers the possibility to support changes without losing track of the requirements. Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It could be very easy, if you have introduced the proper processes to identify changes as quickly as possible, to forward them, to come to the right decisions and to introduce new changes as a result of this. A central point that influences costs and productivity by a great extent is the efficiency of the change management. By identifying, verifying, forwarding and incorporating changes at an early stage costs can be reduced. The closer a product gets to completion, the more drastically the costs increase. There are various reasons for that. Unfortunately a multitude of delayed changes emerge from a lack of communication between the different departments, as well as from a lack of clear guidelines about changes should be treated, and from bit being able to identify all affected parts. As a result you are tied up in changes, instead of controlling them. You are forced into a role in which you cannot act but only react. CM enables you to free yourselves from that role. Configuration management means taking active control over changes, instead of only reacting to them! An extensive and efficient change management is the main difference between product lifecycle management (PLM) and configuration management (CM). While PLM deals with the administration of documents, object lists (BOM) and the physical configuration of a product, CM also covers the complete change management. This includes the connections between all CM-units, as well as the corresponding change applications (ECR, ECN, etc.) and the functional configuration. All this is necessary to come to the right conclusion at the right time and to know when a change might occur, irrespective from where that change originates (construction, production or management changes). How can you make a decision, if you do not have all information available? To prevent uncontrolled changes the entire change history has to be monitored and must be available at any time. If you have any more questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. |
