Engineering Change Management
Engineering change management streamlines product evolution, enhances team collaboration, and ensures the accurate and efficient implementation of changes
What is Engineering Change Management?
Engineering change management (ECM) is a systematic approach to handling modifications in product design, development and manufacturing processes. In today's fast-paced manufacturing environment, it has become essential for companies to maintain the agility necessary to address changing market demands and technological advancements. This encompasses the identification, evaluation, and planning of components, as well as the implementation of changes to products, processes, or documentation.
Why is ECM Important for Modern Manufacturing?
Engineering Change Management is vital because it helps maintain product integrity, reduce errors, minimize disruptions to production, and facilitate seamless communication across teams. By providing a structured framework for managing changes, it enables manufacturers to adapt quickly to market needs while maintaining control over their processes and product quality.
This approach is essential in modern product development, where complex supply chains, global operations and strict regulatory requirements demand a high level of coordination and traceability in all aspects of production.
How the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform Supports ECM
The 3DEXPERIENCE by Dassault Systèmes transforms engineering change management into a seamless, collaborative process. It integrates engineering, design and manufacturing teams within a unified digital ecosystem, offering a single source of truth for all product-related data.
Using a centralized, cloud-based architecture, the platform connects all stakeholders, ensuring everyone remains synchronized—no matter where they are located. From initiating change requests to implementing them, the platform accelerates the decision-making process, improves time-to-market and enhances overall resilience.
Core Pillars of Engineering Change Management
Collaboration
Establish effective communication to maintain alignment across teams.
Traceability
Maintain comprehensive records to ensure compliance and accountability.
Impact Analysis
Evaluate potential effects of changes to proactively mitigate risks.
Automation
Optimize workflows to enhance process efficiency and consistency.
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Leverage real-time data for informed decision-making.
Engineering Change Management & Sustainability
Driving Eco-Friendly Product Evolution
Engineering change management in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) promotes sustainability by enabling eco-friendly design changes and process improvements. This framework helps reduce waste, enhance energy efficiency, minimize environmental impact, and optimize the Bill of Materials (BoM) for sustainability. It also aligns sustainability goals with cost savings and improved product performance.
Use Cases: Engineering Change Management
Collaborative Project Management
Dassault Systèmes enables seamless collaboration in product development by connecting teams, data and processes. Its solutions enhance visibility, accelerate decision-making and ensure project alignment across global engineering teams.
End-to-end Model Based Solutions
Dassault Systèmes integrates engineering processes through a unified platform, combining modeling, simulation, and validation tools. Its solutions enhance collaboration, ensure traceability, and support adherence to quality and certification standards.
Integrated PLM solutions
Dassault Systèmes offers comprehensive product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions that integrate seamlessly with engineering change management processes. These solutions provide a unified platform for managing product data, workflows and change requests across the entire product lifecycle, enhancing collaboration and streamlining product development.
Key Features of Engineering Change Management
Change Request Management
A structured process to submit, review and approve change requests ensures that all proposed changes are evaluated systematically.
Version Control
Tracks and manages different versions of designs, documents and processes, ensuring that teams always work with the latest updates.
Impact Assessment Tools
Advanced tools to analyze the potential effects of changes on costs, timelines, and resources, enabling informed decision-making.
Approval Workflows
Automated workflows streamline the approval process, ensuring that changes are reviewed and authorized by the right stakeholders efficiently.
Integrated Reporting and Analytics
Real-time dashboards and analytics provide insights into change trends, bottlenecks and overall process efficiency.
Compliance Management
Ensures that all changes adhere to industry standards, regulations and internal policies, reducing risks and maintaining accountability.
Streamlining Change Management on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform with the Change Manager Role
The Change Manager role on the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform delivers a strategic, closed-loop collaborative change process that empowers organizations to effectively manage and communicate change decisions across all impacted domains. By providing a single, tailored change methodology, it ensures seamless coordination across teams and workflows, driving operational efficiency and enhancing global product development.
By streamlining the execution of change processes, Change Manager significantly reduces the time and cost across the product lifecycle. It leverages intelligent change management rules, automation and consistent procedures to promote accountability and traceability at every stage. From product governance to work-in-process scenarios, the platform orchestrates change activities in a comprehensive, traceable manner, meeting both organizational and compliance requirements.
How Companies Use ENOVIA PLM Solutions
Customer Stories
Dongfeng Automobile Corporation
The ability to integrate electrical design into the same 3D model while leveraging the single data environment provided by the 3DEXPERIENCE platform also meant we encountered as much as 70% fewer design problems. The quality of our design improved significantly.
With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we can reduce costs by improving R&D efficiency and product quality, as well as accelerating product launches. In turn, those savings get passed on to our customers.
Leveraging Virtual Twin Technology in Engineering Change Management
Virtual twin experiences (VTEs) empower organizations to explore and simulate new innovations, enabling teams to test ideas and predict outcomes in a risk-free virtual environment. Engineering change management complements this by ensuring that decisions derived from VTE insights are seamlessly integrated into the product development process. It maintains accuracy and reliability, fosters collaboration and aligns updates with organizational goals.
By providing traceability for compliance and audits and enabling impact analysis, it reduces risks and supports informed decision-making. Additionally, it accelerates innovation and enhances predictive maintenance, ensuring the virtual twin remains a dynamic and reliable representation of physical assets.
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Engineering Change Management FAQs
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