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 we change names to protect the innocent and retell the classic “…and then something went very, very wrong” stories of our collective past.
Lost in the Woods is an “if only…” story of a company that’s forced to scrap the big roll-out of an extremely promising product redesign when a critical component of the product can’t be sourced in time. Stunned by the loss of so many expected sales and accolades, the company is painfully reminded that true revision control takes more than a spreadsheet bill of materials (BOM) on a server and verbal engineering change notifications (ECNs)—and that even a single discrepancy in the version of the BOM that’s sent to a contract manufacturer (CM) can be disastrous.
Once again, it’s a quick, easy read and a good reminder of why all your hard work to ensure good revision control is worth the effort!
