Engineering Change Management

Benefits

• Provide early visibility to design impact across the extended enterprise through proactive alerts, notifications, and collaborative change management tools
• Ensure accurate data and production readiness at design hand-off by incorporating stakeholders into key processes across your product management lifecycle
• Decrease ECO cycle time through workflow automation and change control board visibility—accelerating time to market

Details

• ECO detail tracking: Consistently track change order information such as originator, item, reason for change, lifecycle status, effectivity date, implementation status, and completion date.
• Automatic change order numbering: Track unlimited types of change orders (e.g., ECO, MCO) with user-defined workflows and review boards. Define tracking categories that support intelligent numbering and simplify change order identification.
• File attachments: Add any number of attachments in any format to add more information about the ECO or its implementation.
• Custom attributes: Configure an unlimited number of custom, searchable attributes and tailor your change order forms for specific business requirements.
• Lifecycle stage support: View dynamic graphical representations of ECO status as well as available actions and outcomes for any lifecycle stage. View common-sense lifecycle rules to help determine the proper action to perform.
• ECO progress tracking: At a glance, view approval deadlines, progress and requested / required actions.
• Business rule enforcement: Enforce common-sense rules to ensure change orders are effectively managed throughout their lifecycle.
• Review boards and routings: Configure the proper approval process and reviewer involvement across each stage. Add approvers as needed outside of predefined routings, and merge review boards as needed for adhoc reviews.
• Multiple routing options: Select from multiple routing options to accommodate the amount of flexibility you want end users or administrators to have in setting the appropriate workflow approval steps and participants for a particular change order or category of change order.
• Supplier access: Automatically notify suppliers any time one of their parts is affected by a change order, and selectively include them in collaborative approval process workflows.
• Document implementation: Track the implementation of the ECO with files and notes. Allow suppliers to add their implementation information through special editing privileges.
• Confidential file protection: Mark any file as private, hiding it from all suplier users, even if they have access to the change order.
• Change order completion: after a change has been processed, mark it as completed to signify no further work is required and, if desired, exclude it from future searches.
• Set approval stages: Require approvals at lower stages before routing changes to higher levels in the organization.
• Minimum approval requirements: Determine minimum approval requirements for each reviewer role.
• Notifications and reminders: Automatically queue and send change order review notifications, reminders, and pending expiration notices, both inside Arena PLM and via email.
• Proxy voting: Enable delegation of change order voting if a reviewer is not available in the specified time frame.
• BOM redlining: Easily identify changes between revisions of an assembly and subassemblies related to a specific change order.
• Parent identification: Easily view affected assemblies for items added to a change order, and mitigate blind revisioning by notifying subscribed users that a change to an item will affect parent assemblies.
• Track implementation: Users implementing the ECO can notify others of their progress by setting an implementation status that's visible throughout the workspace.
• Material disposition tracking: Capture material disposition by material location and set its effectivity date at the item level, either for immediate-on-approval or for future use.
• Custom disposition fields: Set company-specific fields, such as location and disposition action, to reflect your disposition requirements.
• Deviation support: Use temporary change orders for deviations, including stacked deviations.
• Optional real-time voice and text chat: Instantly initiate a collaborative voice conference or text session using Skype Software with selected change control board members. For text chat, you can save the transcript as a part of the product record.