There is no engineering of successful systems without any changes; they are the rule and not the exception in product development. To uncover the problems, rationales and goals associated with changes during the life cycle of a system, an exploratory case study in German industry was conducted. Causes and reasons for changes are described, as well as five strategies to cope with changes and the related methods. One example will show how to successfully prevent and front-load changes. Though the preferred strategies to cope with changes are prevention and front-loading, it is concluded that, in today's dynamic business environments, changes are necessary to stay competitive. Therefore, it is proposed to make late changes cost-efficient by implementing changeability within system architectures. Managing changes has to be understood as a major practice for developing successful systems.

For the reengineering of development processes and for its continuous improvement, the development process has to be modeled and documented. A process map is the basis for the way how a system will be or has been designed. The standard methods and tools for process modeling are mostly used for business process modeling and redesign. Due to the special nature of concurrent engineering processes, a method for process modeling has to be able to support and easily map the high interconnectivity between the process of different engineering disciplines over all hierarchies. The dominant elements in a model for concurrent engineering processes are the informational relations and flows between the different processes. These build the basis for an information-based engineering process.The analysis of models and textual documentation of the engineering processes in an automotive company revealed that different departments used quite different methods and tools for generating their process descriptions. This resulted in very heterogeneous process models with different degrees of detail that idea of client-supplier relations between different processes.A detailed market study was conducted, in which about 30 tools for business process modeling (e.g. ARIS, Bonapart, IDEF, Facets, etc.) were analyzed and evaluated by a variety of criteria. None of these tools met the requirements of the project partner, not only conceming the method, but also conceming supporting factors like easy and fast input of data, multiuser and database support. Another important factor was the fact, that the process model also should be the basis for project planning and scheduling. Hence, a smooth data flow from process mapping to project planning and scheduling should be possible. Therefore, in order to meet all requirements a special process modeling tool was developed which is based on the same database as the project planning tool already in use. The paper describes the reasons for an engineering process driven modeling method and its use, as well as the rationales for developing a new software tool. Also, lessons learned from this approach are described.

There is no innovation process and no engineering of successful systems without any change, but it is absolutely necessary to understand and have a good grip on changes. Based on an analysis in German industry, five strategies are proposed to overcome problems and risks of changes in product development.

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