TFT-LCD industries in Taiwan nowadays have confronted the condition of market¡¦s fast change. The trade shall have to substantially shorten the research and development span of products and also have to inseparably integrate the production system among upper, middle and lower reaches industries so as to advance the enterprise¡¦s competitiveness in the global markets. Therefore, the enterprises have implemented PLM and PDM system in droves to assist in effectively integrating the control and working of all the related information of products and the related operation of the products information during the life cycle of the products. The activity of engineering change is regarded as an essential part to the enterprise¡¦s improving the quality of products and reducing production cost and satisfying the customers¡¦ requirements. There are always possible engineering changes while carried out in each stage of the whole life cycle of products development. Consequently, a rationalized and standardized engineering change management system has then become obviously important to the existence competitiveness of the industries. By ways of case discussion, the study is to research a practical case through PLM system methodology and to confer the design methods of information access subsystem mode applied to the engineering change management module when TFT-LCD industries have implemented PLM system so as to test and verify if the effectiveness of implement is able to satisfy the operation management requirement of the engineering change. Through the analysis of implement process, the study also expects to obtain some rules of experiences as references when the future industry implements the Product life cycle management system.

On account of the rapid change of the market structure of the globalization economy, the competition strategy of the enterprises has conversed from simply pursuing high quality and low cost in the past into the strategy of product design and manufacturing which seeks for satisfying customers¡¦ requirements. Under the manufacturing trend of ODM, in addition that the trades shall continue taking consideration of the original factors of low cost and high quality, factors like the launch time of products, the speed of delivery date and the satisfaction degree of the customers¡¦ requirements have even become the key ones if the enterprises can maintain their competitiveness. Therefore, the enterprise have to make the products design and production operation more flexible so as to accommodate in time with the markets and also conform to the gradually promoted ODM requirements from the markets and continue enhancing ¡§Time-to-Customer¡¨ capability so as to meet and conform to the developing tendency of enterprises¡¦ globalization. Nevertheless, in the current environment of product¡¦s life cycle¡¦s shortening and the uncertain customers¡¦ requirements uncertain, engineering change has then become one considerably important operation of the enterprise in high technology industry. In order to exactly conform to the requirements from the customers and the markets, in each stage of the whole product life cycle whatever in development, samples delivery, production and even the products being sent to the customers may require the demand of engineering change. Consequently, the engineering change is required to have enough emergency dealing capability to ensure the quality, results and the accomplishment of requirements of the products. Only in this way the enterprise shall establish itself in an unassailable position. The purpose of the study is to provide with the management operation procedure of the engineering change suitable for the domestic enterprises by conferring ways of information process and organization process design. First, after it has conferred the products R&D design process or development operation process, it further proposes the corresponding operation strategy, operation process analysis of the industry and applies information technology to achieve the characteristics of the engineering change according to the research result of the academy¡¦s documents. By the control organization of the engineering change and the establishment of the stratum framework, the conclusion of the job duties of the organization and the design of the handling operation process of the engineering change handling, it can control the proposal, dealing, and implement of the engineering change. Taking a case company for example, it has employed the conclusion and suggestion it has obtained by carrying our the analysis and how to apply information technology to implement the engineering change management separately in object to the operation modes to be provided as the reference for the TFT LCD industry in Taiwan to proceed the procedure design while the engineering change management is carried out. Keywords: Engineering Change, Information flow, Organizational Process

On account of the rapid change of the consuming market and the industry market and the widely shortening of product¡¦s life cycle, confronting the stress from the market end, the competition strategy of the enterprises has conversed from pursuing high quality and low cost in the past into the strategy of satisfying customers¡¦ requirements. With the influence of satisfying the customers¡¦ diversified requirement of products, in addition that the trades shall continue taking consideration of the original factors of low cost and high quality, factors like the launch time of products, the speed of delivery date and the satisfaction degree of the customers¡¦ requirements have even become the key ones if the enterprises can maintain their competitiveness. Being facing with the threat from low labor cost of China, India and countries in South-east Asia, the superiority that OEM industries used to have has no longer existed and the only competitiveness they have lies in the R&D design capability. In consideration of this, the enterprises have developed toward globalization commerce and the mode of collaborative product commerce and implement the collaborative product commerce to create an superior R&D environment of products in accommodation with the rapid changed competition markets and integrate and cooperation with the supply chain in the upper and lower reach manufacturers and expect to set up systemized procedure from the process of product R&D to the production so as to promote the service quality to the customers as well as to decrease the failure cost of direct material and supplies and shorten the affect Time to Volume to the turnover and profits and further achieve the earlier winning chance of Time To Market and elaborate multiple strength. Under the circumstance that the speed of customers¡¦ favor to the products and its change have become faster and faster, the life cycle of products has then become shorter and shorter and the characteristics and appearances have also become more and more complicated, which have generated situations such as the structure value of products continually changed and increased, giant increasing information quantity and activities of frequent engineering change. Engineering Change (EC) has thus become an essential and important process in the whole products life cycle. How to fast and effectively deal with the engineering change with collaborative cooperation mode and shorten the products¡¦ launch cycle and ensure the quality and the satisfaction degree of the customers shall be considered as one of the important factors that the enterprises maintain their competitiveness. In view that the operation procedure of product R&D is very complicated, during the process the customers¡¦ requirement, technical demands and the capability of the suppliers may be changed due to the time and condition. Therefore, whether to shorten the time of product development and design shall become the key to determine if the enterprise can accomplish in taking the lead in the business field. According to the investigation, to the senior supervisors of an enterprise, most answers to if the time of new products development and change time of products¡¦ design are important are positive. Such answers also mean that the related issues like the procedure of R&D design and the shortening of engineering change procedure are one of the most popular topics in this trade. PTC and Reed Research Group have proceeded a research in object to more than 200 senior supervisors in charge of new products development and management in the global electronic and high technology companies. The result of the research has shown that the leading trades have gained more than 20% growth of revenue through promoting capability of products development and also gained multiple profits. The extraordinary performance of these companies with high growth is attributed to (a) products planning tools and the use of practical methods (b) mutually establish standardized internal and external coordination with cooperated partners (c) the design staffs have gained at an early date three products development capability like the enterprises and the information of supply chains and are enforced to carry them out so that that are able to implement high efficiency and conform to progress and budge and to keep tracking and solving the potential problems soonest within the design cycle. [1] On the basis of the above-mentioned results of investigation, we find that how the enterprises apply tool like Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) to carry out the engineering change operation under the collaborative environment and further shorten the development and design time of new products and achieve the requests of diversified customers, low cost, high quality and short delivery date and finally become one of the topics that nowadays the enterprises are eager to learn. Engineering change management (ECM) is a sort of changed management in object to the released parts, blueprints, and software during the process of R&D or production and is one part of product R&D procedure. Because it is essential for each stage within the development life cycle of the whole products to carry out engineering change, therefore, the study has proceeded conferring the adjustment condition among the engineering change in object to the collaborative operation of the enterprises and the result of study has also obtained several conclusions to be provided as the reference mode when the enterprises implement ECM system and the related important topic for discussion when it is implemented and the enterprises can make appropriate adjustment and change accordingly. Keywords¡G Collaborative Product Commerce, Engineering Change, Adaptive Structuration Theory

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