Ask any senior design engineer at a manufacturing company in India and they will have a story about the wrong drawing version going to the shop floor. A change was released, the updated drawing went out by email, somebody missed the email, production continued against the old version, and parts were made that do not fit or do not meet the new specification. The story might involve a customer complaint. It might involve a rework batch. If the company is unlucky, it involves a recall.
This is the engineering change management problem, and it is almost universal among manufacturing companies that have grown to a certain scale without implementing a proper document and change control system.
Without a PLM system, engineering change management in most Indian manufacturing companies runs on a combination of email, shared drives, and procedures that exist on paper but are not reliably followed. The failure modes are predictable.
Version proliferation happens when multiple people save copies of drawings to their local drives or to different shared drive locations. Within a year of a product launch, there are often five or six versions of the same drawing scattered across the organization, and there is no authoritative system that tells you which one is current.
Change notification failures happen when the distribution list for engineering change notices is maintained manually. People leave the company, join mid-program, or simply miss an email. The change was issued, but not everyone who needed to act on it received it or acknowledged it.
Impact analysis failures happen when an engineer changes a component without being aware of all the assemblies in which that component is used. In a complex product with hundreds of parts, knowing the downstream impact of a dimension change or material substitution requires the kind of systematic where-used analysis that only a properly configured PLM system can provide quickly and reliably.
A PLM system like Teamcenter makes the change management process systematic rather than procedural. The difference is significant. A procedure that depends on people following it correctly will fail when the pressure is on and shortcuts are taken. A system that enforces the process through its workflow makes the shortcut harder to take than the correct path.
In a Teamcenter environment, drawings and CAD models are stored in a managed vault. There is one current version. Older versions are archived with full history. When a change is initiated, a formal engineering change notice is created in the system. The affected items are identified through automated where-used analysis. Approvals are routed to the relevant stakeholders with deadlines. The change goes to production only after all approvals are recorded. The shop floor can only access the current released version through a controlled output.
This sounds bureaucratic when described in the abstract. In practice, it is faster and less painful than the alternative, which involves a design engineer spending two hours manually checking who needs to be informed about a change and then following up individually to confirm receipt.
The change management use case is one of the cleaner PLM implementation scopes for mid-size manufacturers because it has clear, measurable outcomes and does not require the full complexity of a multi-site, multi-discipline PLM deployment.
A focused change management implementation, covering item master management, CAD data vault, basic BOM management, and engineering change workflow, can be delivered in four to six months for a company with 20 to 80 engineers. The metrics that most companies track after implementation include reduction in drawing version errors, reduction in time-to-release for engineering changes, and reduction in rework attributable to working from incorrect documentation.
For companies that are experiencing the wrong-drawing-version problem with any regularity, the business case for this investment is usually straightforward to build from recent quality incident data.
