Engineering Change Management

Engineering change has grown steadily in prominence both as an important issue for industry and as an active academic research area. This paper provides a categorised overview and perspective on the published academic literature on engineering change. The aim is to give new researchers an understanding of the field's breadth and depth, as well as pointers towards additional information, and established researchers a non-dogmatic summary perspective on the work accomplished in this area. Change is defined as an alteration made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the product design process and life cycle, regardless of the scale or the type of the change. A change may encompass any modification to the form, fit and/or function of the product as a whole or in part, and may alter the interactions and dependencies of the constituent elements of the product. Key aspects of the engineering change process are highlighted along with the tools and methods that are available to support the process. The nature of products (in terms of complexity, architecture and degree of innovation) and how that affects engineering change are covered. Important related areas such as organisational structure and employee attitudes are also highlighted. The paper concludes by discussing different strategies that have been proposed to cope with engineering change in today's manufacturing environment.

With the current financial crisis focus of product development in industry has centred on efficient variant development and increasing the utilisation of existing products and platforms. Together with this change in focus the handling of engineering changes has grown in importance. Several studies however document a slow and inefficient handling of engineering changes, indicating a general low maturity of this area in industry, e.g. (Sharafi et al., 2012), . Although a noticeable amount of work has been published on engineering change, the literature, as highlighted by Jarratt et al. in a recent extensive literature review, overwhelmingly points to the need for more comprehensive guidance in how engineering changes can be handled more efficiently. This paper seeks to address this gap using a capability perspective. Based on literature review and a case study, the process areas especially important to develop capabilities within to ensure an efficient change handling are identified, and an ECM capability framework is proposed. This paper thus enables further research to focus on clarifying ECM capabilities, maturity levels and levers.

In order to stay competitive in a globalized business environment, which has become more and more crucial for manufacturing companies, it is important to control several success factors such as quality, cost and time. An effective management of engineering changes has a positive influence on all of these three factors. Current studies of RWTH Aachen University and the Technical University of Munich underline that decision making processes with focus on engi-neering changes represent an important field of research activities. Deeper studies of the phe-nomenon “engineering change”, its existing approaches of prevention, bringing forward, anal-ysis as well as organised processing lead to the result that there is a need for an improved sup-port concerning the early analysis of potential change solutions’ impact. This is a precondition for the overall evaluation of engineering change requests.
Due to those findings, firstly, a new engineering change process with a strong focus on the analysis of risks and impact of engineering change solutions is defined. Secondly, based on that process, the Property-Driven Change Impact and Risk Analysis (PD/CIRA), a method to analyse and rate potential change solutions, is presented. As PD/CIRA is a combination of the extension of Weber’s CPM/PDD approach and established methods of preventive quality management, PD/CIRA allows the selection of the change solution with the best effort-benefit ratio. Furthermore, PD/CIRA allows more than just the analysis of change impact in-side one product. It is also possible to include the analysis of the change impact on products with same parts, impact on the producibility as well as time-related and economical impact. Additionally, PD/CIRA can be used as controlling tool for engineering changes.

Intensified competition and increased demand for customization has put manufacturing companies under pressure for finding more efficient approaches at handling the operations. As a response to this, Mass Customization (MC) has arisen as a strategy aiming to build the capabilities needed for delivering customized products, while maintaining the economies of scale. Engineering Change Management (ECM), which concern the handling of technical changes, is another field that has grown in importance with the increased demand for customization. Despite the commonalities of these two fields, the relation between MC and ECM has until now not been studied. This paper reports the results of a longitudinal case study in a global manufacturer. The paper contributes an overview of the key enablers of ECM for pursuing the MC benefits. Based on this, the paper contributes with new knowledge on the relation between the maturity of ECM capabilities and the success of MC.

Engineering change has grown steadily in prominence both as an important issue for industry and as an active academic research area. This paper provides a categorised overview and perspective on the published academic literature on engineering change. The aim is to give new researchers an understanding of the field’s breadth and depth, as well as pointers towards additional information, and established researchers a non-dogmatic summary perspective on the work accomplished in this area. Change is defined as an alteration made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the product design process and life cycle, regardless of the scale or the type of the change. A change may encompass any modification to the form, fit and/or function of the product as a whole or in part, and may alter the interactions and dependencies of the constituent elements of the product. Key aspects of the engineering change process are highlighted along with the tools and methods that are available to support the process. The nature of products (in terms of complexity, architecture and degree of innovation) and how that affects engineering change are covered. Important related areas such as organisational structure and employee attitudes are also highlighted. The paper concludes by discussing different strategies that have been proposed to cope with engineering change in today’s manufacturing environment.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the balance of cost between activities within a firm and activities between firms. Easier co-operation allows companies to focus on their core strengths, while forming relations with other firms to supply the other needed skills to bring a product to market. Design, in one firm or in a consortium, is iterative and does

Engineering change has grown steadily in prominence both as an important issue for industry and as an active academic research area. This paper provides a categorised overview and perspective on the published academic literature on engineering change. The aim is to give new researchers an understanding of the field’s breadth and depth, as well as pointers towards additional information, and established researchers a non-dogmatic summary perspective on the work accomplished in this area. Change is defined as an alteration made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the product design process and life cycle, regardless of the scale or the type of the change. A change may encompass any modification to the form, fit and/or function of the product as a whole or in part, and may alter the interactions and dependencies of the constituent elements of the product. Key aspects of the engineering change process are highlighted along with the tools and methods that are available to support the process. The nature of products (in terms of complexity, architecture and degree of innovation) and how that affects engineering change are covered. Important related areas such as organisational structure and employee attitudes are also highlighted. The paper concludes by discussing different strategies that have been proposed to cope with engineering change in today’s manufacturing environment.

Engineering Industries (EI), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Engineering Change Management project with the objective of reengineering several business processes and enabling the processes within PLM 4,5,6,8,11,13,16,19,22,24,27,30,35 applications and DMS 21,28,34,36 applications. The Project covers Engineering Industries (EI) such as Energy Devices 21, 28, 34, 36, Telecom devices, automotive global design centers and manufacturing facilities. The design approach will be covering the Engineering industry’s single PLM 4,5,6,8,11,13,16,19,22,24,27,30,35 system platform for entire Organization for design change. Fundamental project management discipline and tools will be used to control, execute, and monitor the EI 4,5,6,8,11,13,16,19,22,24,27,30,35 implementation. All Scope Change Requests will require cost justification and approval of the EI Steering Committee. A monthly Risk Management Report will summarize the risks, identify the mitigating measures necessary and identify respective responsibilities for implementing them. EI’s key objectives for this Project are: • Enable business process and engineering management efficiency through a single integrated global process model. • Achieve the value for Business Value Assessment through below process: • Business Process Management (BPM) • Process transformation and integration • Standardization of business processes • Strong data governance • Increased automation of processes • Expanded process and business system capability • Implement a Common Enterprise platform across EIs design centers in the Americas leading to accurate and timely Business information • Leverage out-of-the-box functionality and minimize system customization.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the balance of cost between activities within a firm and activities between firms. Easier co-operation allows companies to focus on their core strengths, while forming relations with other firms to supply the other needed skills to bring a product to market. Design, in one firm or in a consortium, is iterative and does require change. The ability of companies to better manage engineering changes (ECs) during product development can decrease cost, shorten development time, and produce higher quality products.This paper concerns engineering change management (ECM) when product development involves more than one company. A review of ECM related papers finds a lack of those that address multi-company design efforts. This approach is based upon recent work in collaborative engineering, which uses elementary engineering decisions, captured as parameters, to drive the collaboration. The relationship between parameters determines the involvement of suppliers and engineering partners. This allows design partners to be informed early as to the impact of design changes. We describe the use of this approach in simultaneous ECM, its implementation within a product data management (PDM) system, and initial test results. We term this approach as ’intelligent’ because it is based upon knowledge captured in the design process itself.

Performing assembly planning to find a valid hierarchical assembling structure of a product (i.e. Manufacturing Bill of Materials or MBOM) based on the constraints and necessities inferred from or declared by different sources is potentially complicated. On the other hand, Engineering Changes (EC) may drastically affect the constraints and necessities which the planning of an MBOM was based on. Managing ECs to evaluate and propagate their effects on the upstream data used in assembly planning and downstream activities and information is crucial but problematic. Often it is possible to define a set of rules for the constraints and necessities of assembly planning and find solutions or check validity of solutions based on the rule-set. This paper proposes a rule-based assembly planning method and introduces the concepts and standard notations on how structured rule-sets can be derived from descriptive rules and then used in an algorithm for generating or validating MBOMs. The method was partially automated and successfully employed along with a commercial Virtual Manufacturing package integrated with an in-house developed GA-based sequence optimizer and applied to the sequence optimization in minimizing the cycle time of the robotic spot welding operations for a sheet-metal assembly found in automotive industry.

In an iterative design process, there is a large amount of engineering data to be processed. Well-managed engineering data can ensure the competitiveness of companies in the competitive market. It has been recognized that a product data model is the basis for establishing engineering database. To fully support the complete product data representation in its life cycle, an international product data representation and exchange standard, STEP, is applied to model the representation of a product. In this paper, the architecture of an engineering data management (EDM) system is described, which consists of an integrated product database. There are six STEP-compatible data models constructed to demonstrate the integratibility of EDM system using common data modeling format. These data models are product definition, product structure, shape representation, engineering change, approval, and production scheduling. These data models are defined according to the integrated resources of STEP/ISO 10303 (Parts 41-44), which support a complete product information representation and a standard data format. Thus, application systems, such as CAD/CAM and MRP systems, can interact with the EDM system by accessing the database based on the STEP data exchange standard.

In current very deep submicron (VDSM) circuits, incremental routing is crucial to incorporating engineering change orders (ECOs) late in the design cycle. In this paper, we address the important incremental routing objective of satisfying timing constraints in high-speed designs while minimizing wirelength, vias and routing layers. We develop an effective timing-driven (TD) incremental routing algorithm TIDE for ASIC circuits that addresses the dual goals of time-efficiency, and slack satisfaction coupled with effective optimizations. There are three main novelties in our approach: (i) a technique for locally determining slack satisfaction of the entire routing tree when either a new pin is added to the tree or an interconnect in it is re-routed-this technique is used in both the global and detailed routing phases; (ii) an interval-intersection and tree-truncation algorithm, used in global routing, for quickly determining a near-minimumlength slack-satisfying interconnection of a pin to a partial routing tree; (iii) a depth-first-search process, used in detailed routing, that allows new nets to bump and re-route existing nets in a controlled manner in order to obtain better optimized designs. Experimental results show that within the constraint of routing all nets in only two metal layers, TIDE succeeds in routing more than 94% of ECO-generated nets, and also that its failure rate is 7 and 6.7 times less than that of the TD versions of previous incremental routers Standard (Std) and Ripup&Reroute (R&R), respectively. It is also able to route nets with very little (3.4%) slack violations, while the other two methods have appreciable slack violations (16-19%). TIDE is about 2 times slower than the simple TD-Std method, but more than 3 times faster than TD-R&R.

The main challenge for product designers, especially of complex products, is to predict as finely as possible the consequence of the product change for its structure as well as its propagation overall the Technical Information System (TIS). Starting from the work already undertaken in this domain, we underline the lack of methods and tools of impact analysis. Our contribution is therefore to bring a method with the aim to facilitate the impact analysis in a multi TIS context. This method, based on a product model supported by a constraints resolution tool, will allow resolving the various constraints levered in an impact analysis problem.

The change process is one of the most critical tasks of the product development process. Misinterpretation or lack of knowledge about impacts or risks of changes can cause serious disadvantages to companies, e.g. high failure or change costs or image losses caused by products with a quality that is unacceptable. Supervising the change process is a challenging task; an important part of this task is the analysis and assessment of risks and impacts of changes. This contribution presents an approach to support the process of analysing and assessing the effects of changes in the product development process. The approach is based on two methods: First on the CPM/PDD theory developed at the Institute of Engineering Design/CAD in order to synthesise potential solutions to change requests and to analyse their impacts; second on the common Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)-method in order to assess the risks and impacts of changes and to document the analysis.

Engineering change has grown steadily in prominence both as an important issue for industry and as an active academic research area. This paper provides a categorised overview and perspective on the published academic literature on engineering change. The aim is to give new researchers an understanding of the field's breadth and depth, as well as pointers towards additional information, and established researchers a non-dogmatic summary perspective on the work accomplished in this area. Change is defined as an alteration made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the product design process and life cycle, regardless of the scale or the type of the change. A change may encompass any modification to the form, fit and/or function of the product as a whole or in part, and may alter the interactions and dependencies of the constituent elements of the product. Key aspects of the engineering change process are highlighted along with the tools and methods that are available to support the process. The nature of products (in terms of complexity, architecture and degree of innovation) and how that affects engineering change are covered. Important related areas such as organisational structure and employee attitudes are also highlighted. The paper concludes by discussing different strategies that have been proposed to cope with engineering change in today's manufacturing environment.

Requirement changes can arise at many points throughout the product life-cycle. Meeting these changed needs necessitates engineering changes to the design. There are various methods and tools to understand such engineering changes in terms of the knock-on effects which could propagate through the system and require change to many other elements of the design. However, there is currently little support to help designers and managers evaluate proposed changes in terms of the total process cost of implementing ...

Product-centric continuous improvements (CIs) are actions via which firms modify the design of a product after the start of its production and release into the market. Product-centric CIs are initiated to help build competitive capabilities and sustain competitive advantage throughout the product life cycle. This study complements the perspective pervasive in the extant literature that actions related to product-centric CIs can be disruptive to firms and be associated with negative performance consequences. It investigates a topic that is relatively much less researched, namely the upside potential of product-centric CIs. The empirical analysis is based on data collected from 144 plants in the United States representing process and discrete part manufacturing industries. Specifically, the study analyzes the impact of product-centric CIs on competitive capabilities and business performance. The results of the empirical analysis indicate the following: First, there exist two categories of product-centric CIs: (1) actions for quality improvement and (2) actions for cost reduction. Second, while there is a positive association between each type of CI and the intended competitive capability, there also is a trade-off-i.e., actions for quality improvement increase quality capability but reduce cost capability, and vice versa. Third, there is a strong linkage between business performance and quality capability, but not cost capability. All in all, the study presents empirical evidence that product-centric CIs have a significant impact on competitive capabilities related to quality and cost, and, in turn, have an impact on business performance. From the standpoint of practice, the study suggests that product-centric CIs should be managed to develop competitive capabilities and improve business performance. . * The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful comments and constructive suggestions of an anonymous reviewer and the editor on earlier versions of the paper. All errors and omissions are the responsibility of the authors. J PROD INNOV MANAG 2013;30(S1):188-202 Corporate Responsibility at the Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota. His areas of research interests are: management of technology and innovation, global supply chain management, quality management, and health care supply chain management. His inquiries are predominantly empirical. Typically, he conducts his scholarly projects in collaboration with industry partners. The empirical settings of his projects have included the high tech; health care/medical; retail; food; and energy/oil and gas industries. His papers have appeared in academic journals such as

The nonsegmented negative strand (NNS) RNA viruses include some of the mosr problematic human, animal and plant pathogens extant: for example, rabies virus, Ebola virus, respiratory syncytial virus, the parainfluenza viruses, measles and infectious hemapoietic necrosis virus. The key feature of transcriptional control in the NNS RNA viruses is polymerase entry at a single 3' proximal site followed by obligatory sequential transcription of the linear array of genes. The levels of gene expression are primarily regulated by their position on the genome. The promoter proximal gene is transcribed in greatest abundance and each successive downstream gene is synthesized in progressively lower amounts due to attenuation of transcription at each successive gene junction. In addition, NNS RNA virus gene expression is regulated by cis-acting sequences that reside at the beginning and end of each gene and the intergenic junctions. Using vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), the prototypic NNS, many of these control elements have been identified.The signals for transcription initiation and 5' end modification and for 3' end polyadenylation and termination have been elucidated. The sequences that determine the ability of the polymerase to slip on the template to generate polyadenylate have been identified and polyadenylation has been shown to be template dependent and integral to the termination process. Transcriptional termination is a key element in control of gene expression of the negative strand RNA viruses and a means by which expression of individual genes may be silenced or regulated within the framework of a single transcriptional promoter. In addition, the fundamental question of the site of entry of the polymerase during transcription has been reexamined and our understanding of the process altered and updated. The ability to engineer changes into infectious viruses has confirmed the action of these elements and as a consequence, it has been shown that transcriptional control is key to controlling the outcome of a viral infection. Finally, the principles of transcriptional regulation have been utilized to develop a new paradigm for systematic attenuation of virulence to develop live attenuated viral vaccines.

Engineering change management of mechanical products is a critical task which poses many challenges for industrials. Both the integration of the various tools intervening in the life cycle of a product and the management of the communication between the various multidisciplinary teams working on a product are difficult tasks. The communication between disciplines is currently performed mostly using message exchange. The approval process of an engineering change can be achieved only if experts representing the various disciplines meet and agree on the change, which can require a lot of time. This paper proposes an agent-based approach that ensures the propagation of an engineering change towards the external systems concerned. It also checks if the engineering change proposed for a mechanical product does not create any inconsistency with the constraints from the various disciplines involved. Each discipline is represented by an expert agent. When an inconsistency is discovered, a negotiation process is launched

The main challenge for product designers, especially of complex products, is to predict as finely as possible the consequence of the product change for its structure as well as its propagation overall the Technical Information System (TIS). Starting from the work already undertaken in this domain, we underline the lack of methods and tools of impact analysis. Our contribution is therefore to bring a method with the aim to facilitate the impact analysis in a multi TIS context. This method, based on a product model supported by a constraints resolution tool, will allow resolving the various constraints levered in an impact analysis problem.

Complex systems and products evolve over years to meet new requirements, while applying tried and tested technology. To maximise the reuse of components through the life span, companies need to plan for the changes that they can anticipate, and facilitate accommodation of such changes in the original architecture and design of the system. Methods such as design for flexibility or design for changeability promote incorporation of future uncertain outcomes into system and product design in one way or another. However, the degree to which future product changes can be planned depends on the uncertainties that the system, product or product family is subject to. A deeper understanding of these uncertainties is the focus of this paper. The paper first provides a brief literature survey, and discusses the sources and nature of uncertainty. This is followed by a classification of the types of uncertainties that are often encountered and that should be considered, as well as methods and techniques for modelling these uncertainties for incorporation in system design. The paper also provides examples of uncertainties for a variety of systems and products throughout and concludes with an uncertainty checklist for system architects and product designers.

With deeper levels of external process integration and a growing number of electronic business relationships, enterprises strive for becoming more interoperable with their business partners. Although B2B standards are supposed to ensure scalable B2B integration and m:n connectivity, enterprises face the challenge of ambiguous interpretations of standards when it comes to their implementation. This paper develops a conceptual model for service-based B2B interoperability which leverages web service technologies for implementing industry standards. The authors instantiate the conceptual model in a concrete B2B scenario in the automotive industry where a consortium of automotive manufacturers and suppliers are currently redesigning their inter-organizational Engineering change Management (ECM) processes. From the evaluation, they conclude that it is not sufficient to specify that standards are used related to pragmatics, semantics and syntax. In order to ensure interoperability, additional design rules are needed which define how industry standards are mapped to a web service design.

Current business challenges such as deregulation, mergers, globalisation and increased competition have given rise to a new process-centric philosophy of business management. The key issue in this paradigm is the concept of business process. From a methodological perspective, this movement has resulted in a considerable number of approaches that encourage the modelling of business processes as a key component of

With deeper levels of external process integration and a growing number of elec-tronic business relationships, enterprises strive for becoming more interoperable with their business partners. Although B2B standards are supposed to ensure scal-able B2B integration and ...

The development of complex products, such as automobiles, involves engineering changes that frequently require redesigning or altering the products. Although it has been found that efficient management of knowledge and collaboration in engineering changes is crucial for the success of new product development, extant systems for engineering changes focus mainly on storing documents related to the engineering changes or simply automating the approval processes, while the knowledge that is generated from collaboration and decision-making processes may not be captured and managed easily. This consequently limits the use of the systems by the participants in engineering change processes. This paper describes a model for knowledge management and collaboration in engineering change processes, and based on the model, builds a prototype system that demonstrates the model’s strengths. We studied a major Korean automobile company to analyze the automobile industry’s unique requirements regarding engineering changes. We also developed domain ontologies from the case to facilitate knowledge sharing in the design process. For achieving efficient retrieval and reuse of past engineering changes, we used a case-based reasoning (CBR) with a concept-based similarity measure.

As functional (total care) products emerge in the jet engine industry, the need for product life-cycle models capable of definition and evaluation of life cycle properties increases, since functional products (FP) includes both hardware and service. Recent life-cycle models are intended for hardware products and mostly handle design and manufacturing knowledge. The aim of this article is to present a design approach that extends the evaluation capabilities beyond classical hardware design and manufacturing evaluation. The focus has been to introduce evaluation of manufacturing and post-manufacturing activities in evaluation of conceptual designs. For this purpose, a model has been proposed to handle the information flow between teams when developing structural jet engine components. A case study, in which the proposed model was used in cooperation with a jet engine component manufacturer, is presented. Aspects concerning design, manufacturing, performance, and maintenance of jet engine flanges were included in the example by means of a knowledge based engineering (KBE)-system coupled to databases and spreadsheets. The model is more suitable than recent work for the development of hardware parts of functional products (HFP), since knowledge from more product development disciplines is included. As the engineer changes the design and directly assesses the life-cycle cost (LCC) and how the changes impact the interface to other jet engine components, more knowledge on the impact of design decisions is available at hand for the engineering designer than without the model.

This paper focuses upon investigating the characteristics of engineering changes and identifying the main reasons for changes arising during the different phases of the lifecycle of complex engineering products. Two case studies representing products with different development processes have been selected and change documentation analysed. The two cases selected were: 1) a variant design product, an aeroengine and 2) a customised product, drilling equipment for the oil industry. The change requests were analysed to understand their distribution and motivation across the lifecycle of the two products. The findings show that change requests peak during the manufacturing phase and indicate that the motivation for change varies throughout a product's lifecycle. The results provide insights into the factors to be considered during the development process in order to reduce the number of change requests from the later phases of a product's lifecycle and to support designers to efficiently address the unavoidable change requests. The findings also show that knowledge is transferred implicitly in the customised design case, resulting in very little knowledge of changes transferred to the next generation of products, whereas in the case of the variant design, knowledge can be transferred incrementally to the next generation of products.

In current very deep submicron (VDSM) circuits, incremental routing is crucial to incorporating engineering change orders (ECOs) late in the design cycle. In this paper, we address the important incremental routing objective of satisfying timing constraints in high-speed designs while minimizing wirelength, vias and routing layers. We develop an effective timing-driven (TD) incremental routing algorithm TIDE for ASIC circuits that addresses the dual goals of time-efficiency, and slack satisfaction coupled with effective optimizations. There are three main novelties in our approach: (i) a technique for locally determining slack satisfaction of the entire routing tree when either a new pin is added to the tree or an interconnect in it is re-routed-this technique is used in both the global and detailed routing phases; (ii) an interval-intersection and tree-truncation algorithm, used in global routing, for quickly determining a near-minimumlength slack-satisfying interconnection of a pin to a partial routing tree; (iii) a depth-first-search process, used in detailed routing, that allows new nets to bump and re-route existing nets in a controlled manner in order to obtain better optimized designs. Experimental results show that within the constraint of routing all nets in only two metal layers, TIDE succeeds in routing more than 94% of ECO-generated nets, and also that its failure rate is 7 and 6.7 times less than that of the TD versions of previous incremental routers Standard (Std) and Ripup&Reroute (R&R), respectively. It is also able to route nets with very little (3.4%) slack violations, while the other two methods have appreciable slack violations (16-19%). TIDE is about 2 times slower than the simple TD-Std method, but more than 3 times faster than TD-R&R.

AutoMod  is a leading discrete-event simulation package widely applied in the modeling and analysis of distribution systems. Included in the AutoMod software suite is the Model Communications Module (MCM), which allows an executing simulation to open socket connections and to send and receive messages via TCP/IP network protocol. In this paper we report on a pilot study which explores the functionality of the MCM. In particular, we develop and implement an architecture that can be used to design, test, verify, and optimize control system software interacting with a discrete-event simulation of the system to be controlled. This architecture supports concurrent engineering of controls and hardware prototypes. Application of this architecture can significantly reduce the duration and cost of development cycles for new equipment and systems. In addition, this architecture can be applied to investigate the feasibility of implementing engineering changes in systems currently deployed.

Planning the design process for complex products is challenging due to obscure component connections, unpredictable task behaviour and non-trivial organ- isational interactions. Nonetheless, many industrial projects are successful. This paper contends that the overview of senior designers plays an important role in bridging the gap between project plans and real- ity. Overview of the product, the process and the or-

the complete design flow for synthesizing power-gated circuits, from operation scheduling to circuit layout, using commercial 65-nm technology. Experiments on benchmark designs showed that HLS-pg can reduce leakage current by 20.7% on average, while cutting area by 5.0% and wirelength by 4.1% over a conventional high-level synthesis which is not specialized for power gating.

A project to enable health care professionals (GPs, practice nurses and diabetes nurse specialists) to access, via the Internet, confidential patient data held on a secondary care (hospital) diabetes information system, has been implemented. We describe the application that we chose to distribute (a diabetes register); the security mechanisms we used to protect the data (a public key infrastructure with strong encryption and digitally signed messages, plus a firewall); the reasons for the implementation decisions we made; the validation testing that we performed and the results of the first set of user trials. From a user acceptance perspective, we conclude that perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use on their own, are insufficient to guarantee that a new application will be used extensively in its new environment. Other domain specific factors, such as the compatibility and integration of the new computing system with the old, the working practices of the clinicians, the costs of using the new system compared to the old, and the actual location of the computing equipment all need to be taken into account when establishing untried information technology in 'real world' settings.

Computer-aided design organizations worry much about the management of the communication between the various multidisciplinary teams working on the same project. The good management of this communication is very important for the success of the engineering change management process. Each discipline must approve or reject a change request according to its constraints and inform the other disciplines involved. Currently, the

Current business challenges such as deregulation, mergers, globalisation and increased competition have given rise to a new process-centric philosophy of business management. The key issue in this paradigm is the concept of business process. From a methodological perspective, this movement has resulted in a considerable number of approaches that encourage the modelling of business processes as a key component of any improvement or re-engineering endeavour. However, there is a considerable controversy amongst all these competing approaches about the most appropriate way for identifying the types and number of relevant processes. Existing business process modelling approaches describe an enterprise in terms of activities and tasks without offering sufficient guidance towards a process-centred description of the organisation. In this paper we advocate the use of a goal-driven approach to business process modelling. A systematic approach to developing and documenting business processes on the basis of the explicit or implicit business objectives is put forward. We argue that such an approach should lead to a closer alignment between the intentional and operational aspects of an organisation. Our approach is exemplified through the use of parts of a large industrial application that is currently making use of a goal-driven business process modelling.

As functional (total care) products emerge in the jet engine industry, the need for product life-cycle models capable of definition and evaluation of life cycle properties increases, since functional products (FP) includes both hardware and service. Recent life-cycle models are intended for hardware products and mostly handle design and manufacturing knowledge. The aim of this article is to present a design approach that extends the evaluation capabilities beyond classical hardware design and manufacturing evaluation. The focus has been to introduce evaluation of manufacturing and post-manufacturing activities in evaluation of conceptual designs. For this purpose, a model has been proposed to handle the information flow between teams when developing structural jet engine components. A case study, in which the proposed model was used in cooperation with a jet engine component manufacturer, is presented. Aspects concerning design, manufacturing, performance, and maintenance of jet eng...

Engineering  changes  occur  in  every  life  cycle  phase  of  a  product  and  in  every  step  of  the  product  development process. Today, the importance of engineering change management as a part of product development is constantly rising. Reasons besides the globalisation are that customers are interested in more customised products at the price of a mass product - a phenomenon [Eckert et al. 2003] call mass customisation -, failures in design and changes in customer wishes that can not entirely be prevented.  According  to  Lindemann  and  Reichwald  [Lindemann  et.  al.  1998]  engineering  change  management  consumes 30 to 50 %, sometimes even up to 70 % of the capacity in product development. According to  Wildemann  [Wildemann  2006]  the  average  cost  of  one  engineering  change  is  about  1.400  EUR  (working hours, scrapping and tooling cost, but no organisational cost). Multiplied with 425 changes per  month  in  average,  identified  by  Deubzer  et.  al.  [Deubzer  2005],  that  results  in  7.1  million  EUR  change cost per year for an average company in the automobile manufacturing industry. According  to  the  rule  of  ten  [VDI2247],  engineering  changes  become  more  expensive  and  time  consuming  the  later  they  occur  in  the  product  life.  Hence,  it  is  advantageous  to  perform  changes  as  early as possible [Lindemann et al. 1998]. But on the other hand, today’s markets and customer wishes change so quickly that a frontloading of engineering changes hinders the technological development of a  company  and  endangers  competitive  advantages  through  innovation  and  customisation.  Additionally, again according to Lindemann and Reichwald [Lindemann et. al. 1998], about 40 % of changes  are  recognised  only  after  the  completion  of  the  production  tools.  That  is  supported  by  Wildemann [Wildemann 2006] who states that 50 % of the design-related changes happen in the pre-series and series phase of the product development process. Approaches  like  Design  for  Changeability  help  to  reduce  change  cost  but  even  can  not  foresee  all  possible  changes.  Therefore,  (engineering)  change  management  is  still  an  important  task  in  product  development. Thereof, especially the area of change impact analysis is the most significant part.

E-Government as a virtual enterprise, having many vertical portals, works in collaborative network to deliver e-services. The decentralization in egovernance depends on how much a governance structure decentralizes its political, fiscal and administrative powers. E-governance devolution areas may be planning, business process re-engineering, change management, enterprise architecture, networks, portals, back-offices, e-services, etc. Improper devolution in e-governance may affect cost, implementation, manageability, trust, outsourcing and localization. In this paper, we analyze a centralized web portal with its outcomes and derive a framework for devolution in e-governance. We propose an extension in the Soufflé theory of decentralization to calibrate suitable degree of devolution in e-governance. At the end we explain our approach by applying it to a real scenario.

Current business challenges such as deregulation, mergers, globalisation and increased competition have given rise to a new process-centric philosophy of business management. The key issue in this paradigm is the concept of business process. From a methodological perspective, this movement has resulted in a considerable number of approaches that encourage the modelling of business processes as a key component of any improvement or re-engineering endeavour. However, there is a considerable controversy amongst all these competing approaches about the most appropriate way for identifying the types and number of relevant processes. Existing business process modelling approaches describe an enterprise in terms of activities and tasks without offering sufficient guidance towards a process-centred description of the organisation. In this paper we advocate the use of a goal-driven approach to business process modelling. A systematic approach to developing and documenting business processes on the basis of the explicit or implicit business objectives is put forward. We argue that such an approach should lead to a closer alignment between the intentional and operational aspects of an organisation. Our approach is exemplified through the use of parts of a large industrial application that is currently making use of a goal-driven business process modelling.