Evaluating and Improving the Efficiency of a Design Change Process: A case study on how a manufacturing company can manage product- and sales structure changes

Abstract

In a world of mass consumption, it is crucial for an organization to continuously improve and adapt its products to meet changing market demands. Having an efficient Engineering Change Management (ECM) process is therefore vital for companies to stay competitive and manage product changes efficiently. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate how manufacturing companies manage product- and sales structure changes in a structured and quality-assured way. The aim was to identify value-adding activities and suggest improvement areas to increase the efficiency of the process. To investigate the Design Change Notice (DCN) process a qualitative case study was conducted at Volvo Penta, including 21 semi-structured interviews. The empirical data was analyzed through thematic analysis and two value stream mappings (VSMs) of the investigated DCN process were constructed to identify waste. Based on the qualitative analysis, it can be concluded that six out of eight types of waste appear directly in the studied DCN process; overproduction, unnecessary motion, transporting, waiting, extra processing, and unnecessary inventory. This thesis presents four improvement areas to mitigate waste and increase the efficiency of the process; system integration and automatization, collaboration and sharing knowledge, standardized change information, and process visualization and role clarification. Further, the study aimed to investigate possible KPIs to measure the value of information, resulting in recommendations of specific measurements for the studied process.