A existência de alterações no produto ao longo de sua vida é um fato inevitável. A efetiva gestão dessas mudanças, diante da atual competitividade do mercado, torna-se uma necessidade. O conhecimento dos aspectos relevantes para a gestão do processo de mudança de engenharia permite a obtenção de melhores resultados. Este trabalho procurou caracterizar o processo de mudança de engenharia, analisando suas dimensões, seus aspectos e práticas de gestão. As discussões são embasadas por uma detalhada revisão da literatura e o estudo de três casos práticos em empresas de manufatura. Tratando-se de uma pesquisa aplicada, os resultados deste trabalho podem ser utilizadas como referência para as empresas que buscam uma efetiva gestão das mudanças ao longo do ciclo de vida do produto. / The existence of modification in the product along its life cycle is an inevitable fact. The effective management of the changes becomes a necessity, considering the current market competitiveness. The correct understanding about the important aspects of the engineering change process management allows the companies obtain superior results. This research aims at to characterize the process of engineering change, analyzing its dimensions, its aspects and management practices. The discussions are based on a detailed literature review and on the study of three practical cases in manufacturing companies. As an applied research, the results can be used as a reference for the companies looking for an effective engineering change management system along the product life cycle.

A existência de alterações no produto ao longo de sua vida é um fato inevitável. A efetiva gestão dessas mudanças, diante da atual competitividade do mercado, torna-se uma necessidade. O conhecimento dos aspectos relevantes para a gestão do processo de mudança de engenharia permite a obtenção de melhores resultados. Este trabalho procurou caracterizar o processo de mudança de engenharia, analisando suas dimensões, seus aspectos e práticas de gestão. As discussões são embasadas por uma detalhada revisão da literatura e o estudo de três casos práticos em empresas de manufatura. Tratando-se de uma pesquisa aplicada, os resultados deste trabalho podem ser utilizadas como referência para as empresas que buscam uma efetiva gestão das mudanças ao longo do ciclo de vida do produto. / The existence of modification in the product along its life cycle is an inevitable fact. The effective management of the changes becomes a necessity, considering the current market competitiveness. The correct understanding about the important aspects of the engineering change process management allows the companies obtain superior results. This research aims at to characterize the process of engineering change, analyzing its dimensions, its aspects and management practices. The discussions are based on a detailed literature review and on the study of three practical cases in manufacturing companies. As an applied research, the results can be used as a reference for the companies looking for an effective engineering change management system along the product life cycle.

Engineering changes 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. This change propagation significantly affects the success of a product in the market by increasing development cost and time-to-market. As such engineering change management is essential to companies, but it is a complex task for managers and researchers alike. To address this challenge, the thesis at hand investigates the state-of-the-art of research in engineering change management and develops a method to support engineering change propagation analysis, termed FBS Linkage. This method integrates functional reasoning with change prediction. A product is modelled as a network of its functional, behavioural, and structural attributes. Change propagation is then described as spread between the elements along the links of this network. The FBS Linkage concept is designed based on a comprehensive set of requirements derived from both the literature and industry practices as well as a comparative assessment of existing change methods and functional reasoning schemes. A step-by-step technique of building and using an FBS Linkage model is demonstrated. The method’s potential benefits are discussed. Finally, the application of the method to two industrial case studies involving a diesel engine and a scanning electron microscope is presented. The method evaluation indicates that the benefits of the method outweigh its application effort and pinpoints areas for further refinement.

La gestion des changements d’ingénierie, appelée aussi ingénierie du changement, est un domaine de recherche qui s’intéresse à l’étude des changements et des modifications apportés par les concepteurs industriels sur un produit durant l’une des phases de son cycle de vie. Ces changements peuvent exister dans le cadre de renouvellement d’un produit dans un but d’amélioration ou de reconception. Dans la littérature, plusieurs méthodes et outils ont été mis en place pour évaluer l’impact d’un changement en utilisant les dépendances existantes entre les éléments d’un produit, prédire de façon efficace la propagation du changement et évaluer ensuite ses conséquences possibles. Mais aucun d’entre eux n’a tenté de caractériser la relation de dépendance sous la forme d’une fonction polynomiale, en plus des caractérisations classiques par valeurs qualitatives et quantitatives. Nous proposons donc, une nouvelle méthode pour générer les variations possibles d’un changement, afin de modéliser ces variations par paire sous formule analytique, d’étendre les variations par paire aux variations de plusieurs variables et de vérifier formellement la cohérence des résultats obtenus. Visuellement, un graphe de dépendance est construit oú les noeuds représentent les éléments de produit et les arcs portent les fonctions qui les relient. Nos résultats montrent que cette caractérisation fonctionnelle de la dépendance est instructive et permet une propagation de changement et une évaluation efficace. Un modèle géométrique 2D d’un vélo est utilisé pour illustrer l’approche proposée. / Engineering Change Management, also known as Change Engineering, is the research domain that focuses on the study of changes and modifications brought by industrial designers on a product during one of the phases of its life cycle. These changes can exist in the case of product renewal for improvement or re-design. In the literature, several methods and tools have proposed to assess the change impact using the existing dependencies between the product components, predict effectively the change propagation and then evaluate its possible consequences. However, none of them attempted to characterize the dependency relationship in the form of a polynomial function in addition to the qualitative and quantitative values. Therefore, we propose, a new method to generate change variations, in order to model these variations in pairs with an analytical formula, expand the variations in pairs to changes in several variables and formally check the consistency of the results obtained. Visually, a dependency graph is constructed where nodes represent the components of product and edges are the functions that connect them. Our results show that this functional characterization of dependency allows an effective assessment of change propagation. A bike with 2-D geometric model is used to illustrate the proposed approach.

A method has been created that addresses the issues that prohibit the conversion of product artifacts into a secure, efficient and reliable Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. These issues include automatic import of data into a PLM system and revision control of such data. A test case is shown which specifically addresses these issues as they pertain to the management of both legacy and new engineering data in a PLM system.

Unternehmen stehen vor der Herausforderung, effizient und kostengünstig zu produzieren. In diesem Zusammenhang kommt dem Industrial Engineering (IE) eine hohe Bedeutung zu, denn es besitzt das Potenzial zum ganzheitlichen Produktivitätsmanagement über den gesamten Produktentstehungs- und herstellungsrozess sowie alle Unternehmensbereiche. Dieses Potenzial wird zwar mittlerweile von einer Vielzahl von Unternehmen erkannt, jedoch kaum genutzt, was insbesondere in einem fehlenden Konzept für das ganzheitliche Industrial Engineering im Unternehmen begründet liegt. Daher wird ein fundamentales „Reengineering“ des Industrial Engineerings notwendig, das im Kontext des Zusammenwirkens von Mensch, Technik und Organisation, den Mitarbeiter in den Fokus seiner Aktivitäten rückt. Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Arbeit wird deswegen erstmals eine Gestaltungssystematik für das Industrial Engineering vorgestellt. Diese gibt Hilfestellung für die Implementierung des Industrial Engineerings im Unternehmen und speziell an ausländischen Standorten, um durch eine geeignete Gestaltung der Aufbauorganisation dessen adäquate Einbindung im Unternehmen sicherzustellen. Zudem liefert die Gestaltungssystematik wertvolle Hinweise sowohl für die Personalauswahl als auch den Personaleinsatz im IE. Ferner unterstützt ein Leitfaden für das kulturadäquate Change Management die Durchführung von Gestaltungs- und Rationalisierungsvorhaben im Rahmen der eigentlichen Tätigkeit des Industrial Engineers im internationalen Kontext.:1 Einleitung 2 Stand der Wissenschaft und Praxis auf dem Gebiet des Industrial Engineerings 3 Theoriegeleitete Entwicklung eines Ansatzes für das interkulturelle Management im iIE 4 Theoriegeleitete Entwicklung eines Ansatzes für das Change Management im iIE 5 Entwicklung einer Gestaltungssystematik für das „integral Industrial Engineering“ 6 Evaluation der entwickelten Gestaltungssystematik 7 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick / To cope with tough international competition, companies are faced with the demand for highly efficient and productive manufacturing as well as service processes and the need to identify potential for rationalization in order to ensure the economic performance of the company. Industrial Engineering is playing a key role in planning and optimizing work systems and processes in ergonomic as well as economical terms to improve enterprise's productivity. Currently there is no common understanding of IE, of its specific functions as well as its organizational fixture in enterprise's praxis. Because of this lack between research and practice, enterprises waste the potential of IE for the increase in productivity. To overcome the problem of a missing holistic approach for the continuous productivity management, a systematic approach for the full potential utilization of IE will be introduced. This firstly facilitates the institutional configuration of a human-oriented IE in enterprises of the manufacturing and the service sector and secondly helps to realize measures of work design as well as work rationalization by means of a strong change management. Thus, the developed design approach systematically contains dimensions and parameters for the implementation of an overall Industrial Engineering enabling to unleash productivity potentials by considering the technology as well as the human factor and organizational conditions. Furthermore, for the first time the intercultural differences influencing the Industrial Engineering on the functional, structural and personnel level are explicitly considered in the novel approach. From a practice-oriented point of view, the approach helps to give concrete recommendations for the implementation of the Industrial Engineering as well as for the job of the Industrial Engineers being sent as expatriates to Poland or the Czech Republic.:1 Einleitung 2 Stand der Wissenschaft und Praxis auf dem Gebiet des Industrial Engineerings 3 Theoriegeleitete Entwicklung eines Ansatzes für das interkulturelle Management im iIE 4 Theoriegeleitete Entwicklung eines Ansatzes für das Change Management im iIE 5 Entwicklung einer Gestaltungssystematik für das „integral Industrial Engineering“ 6 Evaluation der entwickelten Gestaltungssystematik 7 Zusammenfassung und Ausblick

Engineering is inherently a process of constant change. The process of managing engineering changes is however, not a new topic and it is well defined and implemented in various other engineering management philosophies. Yet, on its own, it still remains a very challenging problem to organisations. This research examines the applicability of engineering change management to a large steel manufacturing company who identified the lack of an engineering change management system as the main contributing factor of numerous problems the company experienced over time. The study sets out to determine the high level understanding, the level- and sophistication of practical implementation and quality (identified problems with existing, or the lack of existing systems) of the engineering change management procedures. The study also compared how three surveyed companies relate in terms of their engineering change management systems and how the companies relate to the academic principals found in literature. Furthermore everyday user experience was measured to determine what aspects of engineering change is important and what needed improvement As part of the research, literature was reviewed and it was found that various authors, practitioners and academics agreed that engineering change management is increasingly important as an engineering management item. The literature revealed high-level requirements, models and constituents that are required for successful engineering change management. A questionnaire survey was developed as the experiment to measure how engineering change management was perceived practically. The aspects and phases listed from literature were examined and the perceptions, experience and feedback from the engineers that face engineering changes on a daily basis was determined. The general understanding and feeling towards their engineering change management was analysed and used to identify areas of common problems. The two other surveyed companies: a petrochemical company and a specialised product company provided means to determine if the process of engineering change management could be generalised and applied to the large steel manufacturing company. The analysis of the results of the survey provided valuable information that was used to conclude why some companies were able to achieve success with their engineering change management procedures and why others failed or struggled. The research effectively showed how engineering change management is perceived both negatively and positively in industry and identified common areas where improvement can be made. Furthermore, it can be concluded that engineering change management remained generic from a high-level and would thus be applicable to the large steel manufacturing company. The study also determined that engineering change management can effectively be used to mitigate and reduce the effects of uncontrolled changes that were listed by the large steel manufacturing company. / MIng (Development and Management Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Engineering is inherently a process of constant change. The process of managing engineering changes is however, not a new topic and it is well defined and implemented in various other engineering management philosophies. Yet, on its own, it still remains a very challenging problem to organisations. This research examines the applicability of engineering change management to a large steel manufacturing company who identified the lack of an engineering change management system as the main contributing factor of numerous problems the company experienced over time. The study sets out to determine the high level understanding, the level- and sophistication of practical implementation and quality (identified problems with existing, or the lack of existing systems) of the engineering change management procedures. The study also compared how three surveyed companies relate in terms of their engineering change management systems and how the companies relate to the academic principals found in literature. Furthermore everyday user experience was measured to determine what aspects of engineering change is important and what needed improvement As part of the research, literature was reviewed and it was found that various authors, practitioners and academics agreed that engineering change management is increasingly important as an engineering management item. The literature revealed high-level requirements, models and constituents that are required for successful engineering change management. A questionnaire survey was developed as the experiment to measure how engineering change management was perceived practically. The aspects and phases listed from literature were examined and the perceptions, experience and feedback from the engineers that face engineering changes on a daily basis was determined. The general understanding and feeling towards their engineering change management was analysed and used to identify areas of common problems. The two other surveyed companies: a petrochemical company and a specialised product company provided means to determine if the process of engineering change management could be generalised and applied to the large steel manufacturing company. The analysis of the results of the survey provided valuable information that was used to conclude why some companies were able to achieve success with their engineering change management procedures and why others failed or struggled. The research effectively showed how engineering change management is perceived both negatively and positively in industry and identified common areas where improvement can be made. Furthermore, it can be concluded that engineering change management remained generic from a high-level and would thus be applicable to the large steel manufacturing company. The study also determined that engineering change management can effectively be used to mitigate and reduce the effects of uncontrolled changes that were listed by the large steel manufacturing company. / MIng (Development and Management Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014