CASE STUDY 1 Prevention of Engineering Change Errors

Prevention of Engineering Change Errors :

A system to support efficient management decision making and project direction, and collects and summarizes all the related information was needed. Such system’s scope is the prevention of potential build problems by analyzing early BOM Data in relation to Vehicle Order data.

Corporate directives required the use of standard methods and systems whenever possible. One case in which the corporate system supports the automaker well, is in the Engineering Change Control process, specifically the “Bill of Materials” system and auxiliary utilities that produce reports that identify potential problems when adopting changes and their impact to the BOM explosion for parts ordering in the near and not so near future .

Initial Situation:

Daily report contains all the engineering changes that needed to be analyzed against the BOM explosion data to support correct parts ordering. Report ranged up to 3000 pages of information checked manually by the specialists.

Errors detected by the specialists listed/ presented to management for approval. Approved changes made manually to BOM information in corporate system via the regular user interface.

Challenges and Goals:

1- Eliminate paper report.
2- Distribute Engineering Changes automatically to the responsible specialists.
3- Automate cross-checking of BOM data with orders data to highlight potential problems.
4- Provide a user-friendly interface to allow users to monitor their responsibilities.
5- Provide reliable management monitoring of engineering changes processes.
6- Provide long term storage of daily BOM data.
7- Provide automatic notification to specialists/management if data not checked.

Approach:

Capture soft copy of daily printed report.
Create parser program to extract relevant data in structured format and store information in a set of database tables.
Write post-processor program to automatically distribute work to specialists three times daily.
Create user-friendly application to facilitate corrections to the BOM data and “close” any open Engineering Changes.

Benefits:

1-Cost reduction in the form of paper savings, cabinet storage and long term data retention off-site. One customer’s saving amounted to 0.5 hours per engineer, per day. The company employed 20 engineers at the time of this project.
2-Improved accuracy of data modifications.
3-Improved monitoring to capture all Engineering Change and guarantee on-time processing to prevent costly problems downstream.