Engineering Change Implications on Product Design: A Review of the Literature

Engineering changes are inexorable and can arise at any phase of the product life cycle. To capture the maximum market shares manufacturers have to effectively and efficiently manage engineering changes. This paper provides overview of ECM and perspective on the published academic literature related to product engineering changes. The aim is to give an idea and understanding about the engineering changes in product to the new researchers. Engineering changes can be taken in both aspects such as an opportunity to enhance the product performance and as a burden, resulting in a rework, which utilizes resources, time and cost. It is paramount that the impact of engineering changes be identified, assessed and implemented as early as possible. Different methods/tools have been devised to better understand the engineering change phenomenon and to control the changes. ECM can help to mitigate the potential of negative consequences arising from uncertainties during the product life cycle. In this paper the significant aspects of the engineering changes have been discussed and highlighted the methods/tools that are proposed by the researchers. The review shows the prominence of ECM in a product life cycle. Introduction Increasing competitiveness in the market due to fast growing change environment forces the manufacturers to pursuit ways to produce a high quality product at the lowest cost with the minimal lead time. To reduce the risk and the manufacturing time, companies promoted to focus on the incremental products. Customers desire reliable & efficient products, therefore they esteem tried & tested artefact with improved parts. In case of incremental products, retaining the existing design significantly reduces the cost and also the manufacturing lead time. Most of the new designs are not developed from the scratch, but designed through modifications and changes to the existing design [1]. These products have new functions, characteristics and performances that rely on the existing product design. In the initial product designing stage, the designers come across the intimidating task of assessing the engineering parameters which effectively improve the product performance. These parameters should be focal point throughout the product development. Traditionally the designers select theses parameter based on the knowledge gained by experience. For identifying the key engineering parameters during the conceptual design a domain-independent methodology has been proposed in [2] by Kaldate. The information regarding product parameters increases in quantity and also in quality as the design proceeds and provides a better insight of the design issues. The advice “do it right the first time” is illusory and far away from real life [3]. Engineering changes have great influences on product developing and production activities, hence making product development very costly and time consuming [4]. In the early decades the engineering changes were predominantly seen as a problem. People were reluctant to implement the change management system. From the past few decades it has been seen that industrialist take it as an opportunity and source of innovation & creativity [5, 6]. Engineering changes can be taken into account as a driving force for incremental product improvement. Keeping in view the above, knowledge attained from engineering changes is very helpful and useful for the design and development of the product. In manufacturing, today’s markets and customers wish change so International Conference on Education, Management and Computing Technology (ICEMCT 2015) © 2015. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 1679 quickly [7]. Engineering changes arises frequently for continual improvement of the system/product and determines approximately 70 to 80% of the final product cost [8]. The paper is structured in such a way that in Section 2, definitions of the key terminologies used in the field of ECM are presented. Section 3 states the methodology to carry out the literature review. Section 4 describes definition and categorization of ECs, objective of ECM and handling approaches. In section 5, product architecture has been elaborated. Section 6 gives an idea about the change propagation. Section 7 discusses the engineering change process. In section 8, tools and methods to support ECM have been presented. Section 9 gives the summary of the paper. Definitions There are some key terminologies which are used in the field of ECM and are defined as follows: • Function is the intention or purpose of the artefact [9, 10] and Hubka called it, duty of the artefact [11]. • Behaviour describes what the artefact does and how it achieves it functions or purpose [12]. • Structure describes distinctive variables that identify the artefact and their interactions [13] and structure can also be defined as a set of entities connected in a meaningful way [14]. • Impact is the “average proportion of the design work that will need to be redone if the change propagates” [15]. • Likelihood is defined as the “average probability that a change in the design of one sub-system will lead to a design change in another by propagation across their common interface” [15] Methodology The research commenced with a rigorous literature review on current ECM practices. To conduct the literature review, specific to the product, different journals and conferences were focused for review of the topic. Literature selection Inorder to carry out the review on the selected topic the word “Engineering change” was searched in the articles title and abstracts. The search engine “Google Scholar” and the journals to which the access is provided by the university were the main source for downloading the related papers. Total 278 papers were downloaded for the literature review from different sources. Journals and conferences The collection of publications has been done by consulting multitude of journals and conferences related to the product design and ECM as a source for literature review. The main journals which were used as a source for downloading the related papers/articles are: Journal of Engineering Design, Computers in Industry, Research in Engineering Design, IEEE Transaction on Engineering Management, Computer Aided Design and Applications, Design Studies, International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, Computer and Industrial Engineering, Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering etc. Conferences proceedings which were included in the literature review are: International Design Conference (IDC), ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference, CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, Conference on System Engineering Research, International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED) and International Design Structure Matrix Conference (IDSMC). Distribution of Publications over year 278 papers were downloaded for review which contains 55% of the papers from the journals and 45% of the papers were from conferences. Only 04 papers were found from the resources discussed above before 1990 and they are not included in the graph. The publications distribution in figure 1 shows increase until 2007. 31 publications out of 278 were published in 2007 with a peak of 12.16 %. There is a decrease in the publication after 2007 upto 2013. In 2014 there is again a slight rise in the graph with 15 publications. From this graph it has been concluded that interest in the field of ECM steadily increased till 2007 where it get its peak. Form 2007 onwards upto 2013 there