A Documented Configuration Change Control Workflow to Conceptual Design for Supply Chain

As outsourcing and globalization increase the number of supply chain participants, a collaborative product development will enable companies to speed up the decision-making of supply chains of trusted partners, employees, suppliers, and customers. The first phase of new product development is conceptual design. Eighty percent of the product development costs are determined during this phase. Due to continuous changes in design projects, delays in product developments are not rare. Thus, a change control workflow is needed among supply chain participants for product development especially for new product development. A distributed change control process applying the principles of configuration management for conceptual design is therefore proposed. A baseline of inter-document relationship is utilized to maintain the consistence of design documents among supply chain participants. With the proposed distributed change control process, the intervention resources are reduced and the quality of conceptual designs are increased