Engineering change management challenges and management cybernetics

Competitive advantage in mature industries is very important for companies to thrive in the market. One possibility for attaining competitive advantage is pursuing systematic product development (PD) efforts, which keep the requirements of the customers in focus. Engineering change (EC) processes as part of PD efforts are present at the back end of almost all PD projects. EC processes usually change parts, drawings, software of the product in order to meet variations in internal and external requirements. Therefore, engineering change management (ECM) is crucial for the overall success of a PD project, as it is used to coordinate process activities which drive the maturity progress of the product. The main objective of this paper is to identify the main challenges and problems in managing engineering changes and to propose an approach that tackles these challenges from the systems perspective. To accomplish this objective, a thorough review of ECM literature was performed. In particular, topics such as ECM processes, organization and strategies to cope with ECs were analyzed. This gave the authors not only an overview of the currently most important challenges in ECM, but also ideas on how these challenges could be addressed. Because of the coordination and communication complexity that arises in ECM processes, a systemic approach is proposed. As a conclusion, the viable systems model stemming from management cybernetics is considered as the most appropriate approach to cope with such coordination and communication complexities.