Modeling and managing engineering changes in a complex product development process

Today’s hypercompetitive worldwide market, demanding customers, and technological advances force corporations who develop new products to look into all the possible areas of improvement throughout the entire product life cycle management process. One of the research areas that have been overlooked in the past is engineering change management (ECM). This paper presents a simulation model for investigating the mutual impacts of ECM process and new product development (NPD) process on each other. The discrete event simulation model investigates how different NPD and ECM process characteristics are interrelated, and how these interactions eventually affect the lead time, cost, and quality of an NPD project. This model has the capacity to account for three different levels of uncertainties, namely activity uncertainty, design solution uncertainty, and environment uncertainty, and their effects on the probabilities of NPD rework. Decisions to be made by considering EC impacts are drawn from an enterprise level system perspective.