Towards a collaborative process for engineering and manufacturing change management

Due to innovation cycles, technology life cycles, and product life cycles, manufacturing companies frequently need to manage changes of their product and their manufacturing system. In order to address this challenge, several processes and methods for change management within product development and manufacturing planning have been developed separately. However, due to the high connectivity of products and manufacturing systems, an individual change management contains the risk of undetected impacts on the other domain. Furthermore, the social side of management is currently not sufficiently considered in the technical change management processes. Therefore, this paper presents an collaborative process for engineering and manufacturing change management including socio-technical success-factors for the main steps “proactive change management”, “change design”, “change implementation”, and “change application and evaluation”. In order to minimize coordination efforts, a separate change management is suggested as far as possible and collaborative steps are defined clearly.