Engineering changes (ECs) are unavoidable and occur throughout the lifecycle of products. Due to the high interconnectivity of engineering products, a single change to one component usually has knock-on
effects on other components causing further changes. The impact of such changes propagates beyond the product domain to the design process domain and significantly affects the success of a product by increasing development cost and time-to-market. Managing such ECs is thus essential to companies and its improvement remains a challenge for managers and researchers alike. While existing change management methods focus on the product domain, there is a lack of design process-oriented methods.
This paper presents a framework aimed at improving engineering change management (ECM) through integration of product and process domains and elaborates its first building block – the FBS Linkage model, a novel, multi-layered change prediction and analysis method in the product domain based on the FBS model [Rosenman and Gero 1998]. The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides the background for this research including an introduction to ECM and a review of relevant tools and methods. Section 3 presents the proposed integrated framework and subsequently develops the FBS Linkage model. Section 4 presents an initial case study to demonstrate the application of the proposed method. Finally, Section 5 presents the paper summary and conclusion.