Engineering Change Management
Although a solid change management process is absolutely necessary, it’s easy to fall into an overly complicated, unnecessary or misunderstood engineering change request (ECR) process—especially if your process lacks purpose. In some cases, by the time you craft the ECR, add in the appropriate documentation, talk it over with the product engineer and send the [...]
It’s the end of the year—the best time to get organized for the year to come. If you found yourself struggling with out-of-control changes in 2011, maybe it’s finally time to create and formalize an engineering change process. While creating a process to manage the unexpected may seem oxymoronic, for a business to run successfully, [...]
You can’t engineer without a process for managing product changes, but the road to a solid change management process is frequently bumpy, and lined with certain battles. If you can fight through the initial pain of setting up a process, having a solid and formalized way to manage change leads to less scrap and rework, [...]
Using an ERP system to manage constantly changing BOMs during product design is a common trap that many organizations fall into. Although ERP systems shine as transactional tools that manage inventory and provide control throughout production, they’re not built to manage the engineering change process or keep everyone on the same page—internal and external vendors [...]
We often meet small and mid-size manufacturers when they’re in the midst of a growth stage—and the processes they’ve created on the fly are no longer good enough to keep product development running smoothly. While the engineering change process is one of the first places most of them want to add more structure, we typically [...]
If you’re reading this blog, you most likely know the vital importance—and enormous challenge—of good revision control when designing and manufacturing products. Lost in the Woods: The three things you should do to prevent revision control failures is the second installment of the Product Disaster Series and can be found in the Arena Dispatches, where [...]
As a parent of young children, product safety is always top of mind. So when two products I count on were recently recalled in what felt like short succession, it got me thinking. (While I did have a moment of panic when I realized that my babysitter drives my children around in a Toyota RAV4—not [...]
Every product company has a story–one that makes you cringe just thinking about it–where something went wrong…really, really wrong. A situation that could have been avoided if only…. At Arena we hear these stories all the time. They wrench our gut and remind us of the days when we worked in manufacturing. We’ve taken these [...]
