Study Of Sme Product Engineering Change Management Issues

Product engineering change is almost unavoidable and goes across whole product life cycle. It will, in varying degrees, extend product development cycle time and increase development cost. The main purpose of doing product Engineering Change Management (ECM) is not to avoid further product changes, but to speed up change handling, eventually to reduce impacts on such as product cost, quality etc.Compared to big enterprises which often embrace rich resources, Small-and-Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) face bigger challenges during product engineering change management. Along with more and more intensive market competition, in order to meet demands of globalized market, SMEs, in one hand, have to take care of their products to meet same level of regulatory compliance requirements, speed up responses to market changes, on the other hand, they need take care of diversified product requirements to achieve and sustain its competence. While when looking at resources that SMEs have, it is often difficulties, such as "lack of resources because of early growth phase", "disparity of knowledge intelligence", "high intelligence turnover rate" etc. These facts, in turn, further increase SMEs ECM complexity and difficulties. Accordingly, it turns worthwhile to do a very good research on how SMEs handle product engineering change effectively.This article starts from SMEs, firstly investigates the major difficulties existed during product engineering change management. Then, takes SMEs' special conditions into account, analyze three major difficulties in SMEs - change workflow flexibility, change data management, cross-functional team's collaboration, eventually try to come up with a good and reasonable solution.Main work as below:Firstly describe ECM research status, analyze product engineering change root-causes from several different perspectives and describe ECM business objectives. In the end, illustrate this article's mainframe work.Then, set up EC Model and analyze its functional models and process flow, then create EC change model by change objects. After that, bring out the major difficulties exist in SMEs' ECM - Process Flexibility, Data Management, and Collaboration Management.In the next step, dive deep of analysis on each of these major difficulties.In the last, summaries whole researches of this article and foresee further research needs on ECM.