Requirements-based development of an improved engineering change management method

Abstract

Engineering changes (ECs) are essential in complex product development, and their management is a crucial discipline for engineering industries. Numerous methods have been developed to support EC management (ECM), of which the change prediction method (CPM) is one of the most established. This article contributes a requirements-based benchmarking approach to assess and improve existing methods. The CPM is selected to be improved. First, based on a comprehensive literature survey and insights from industrial case studies, a set of 25 requirements for change management methods are developed. Second, these requirements are used as benchmarking criteria to assess the CPM in comparison to seven other promising methods. Third, the best-in-class solutions for each requirement are investigated to draw improvement suggestions for the CPM. Finally, an enhanced ECM method which implements these improvements is presented.

Process models in design and development

“…Gero and Kannengeiser (2014) write that FBS and Situated FBS offer conceptual tools for understanding designing and provide bases for uniform coding of design protocols, allowing design activity to be studied independently of domain. The FBS framework and its underlying product model mentioned at the start of this paragraph have also been widely adopted to structure conceptual, computational, and empirical studies (e.g., Howard et al 2008;Hamraz et al 2013).…”

Industrial evaluation of FBS Linkage – a method to support engineering change management

“…At the end of the workshops, the experts were given a questionnaire including 25 requirements for ECM methods and their descriptions, and they were asked to rate the method against the requirements using a scale from 1 to 5 as follows: 1 (strongly disagree), 2 (disagree), 3 (neither agree nor disagree), 4 (agree), and 5 (strongly agree). These requirements were developed and discussed in (Hamraz et al 2013b), following five steps: First, publications describing 54 ECM methods were reviewed to draw a long list of requirements from literature. Second, requirements based on case-study experience were added to the list.…”

“…This method, termed FBS Linkage, models the product in greater detail and allows for more detailed analysis of ECs. While we have presented the development approach and some details of the FBS Linkage method in (Hamraz, Caldwell, and John Clarkson 2012;Hamraz et al 2013b), an industrial evaluation still remains to be done. This is the focus of this paper at hand.…”

“…Based on a comprehensive systematic literature survey and categorisation, Hamraz et al (2013b) identified 54 ECM methods. These methods support knowledge representation in product design and have a fundamental goal in common: they capture tacit knowledge that is held as experience in the heads of designers and make it formal and available within the whole organisation (Chandrasegaran et al 2013).…”

“…The requirement-based approach undertaken to develop the FBS Linkage method was presented in (Hamraz et al 2013b). An earlier status of the method including details on the ontology and underlying assumptions and an initial application to a simplified model of a diesel engine design was presented in (Hamraz, Caldwell, and John Clarkson 2012).…”