IMPROVING RELIABILITY AND MAINTAINABILITY PROGRAMS WITH CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT - THE NEXT REVOLUTION

Manufacturers need to set higher reliability and maintainability standards and improve their ability to reach them. Fortunately, a proven methodology-configuration management-facilitates this process. The role of configuration management is to define and communicate the desired end result and to control and incorporate changes to the definition throughout the product's life cycle. Configuration management provides a degree of control throughout a product's development that ensures the predictability of achieving reliability and maintainability goals as well as cost, quality, and schedule objectives. Management is often unable to visualize how elements at the front-end of the product development process can later necessitate a multitude of costly changes. Early implementation of configuration management can help management see the light at the end of the product development tunnel. Aggressive reliability and maintainability targets cannot be reached in a piece-meal manner. Rather, success requires an integrated and comprehensive approach such as configuration management-the next manufacturing revolution.