Engineering Change Management:

INTRODUCTION

The Lifeblood for Product Development

The lifeblood for getting new products to market, or improving existing ones, is engineering change management. Engineering, quality, purchasing, manufacturing, and supply chain partners must be able to work together seamlessly to design, develop, test, build, and ship high-quality products to customers fast and effectively. For regulated companies, this includes adhering to a myriad of environmental, safety, ISO, FDA, ITAR, EAR, and other directives or standards.

Engineering change management allows dispersed teams to create, review, and approve new or existing designs. It provides a level of control, typically revision-based, to ensure that everyone is working around the right design and the right time.

Over the past few decades, engineering change management processes evolved from manual, paper-based systems to email-based sharing of electronic documents. Many newer point solutions—even those in the Cloud – are not fully connected to the entire product design record or other related requirements, quality, and project records. Without a single system, or single source of truth, internal teams and their partners have a harder time identifying the latest information and risk product launch delays and costly production errors.