What problems do organizations face during the implementation of changes in their product designs and how do they control them? For answering this question, I will take some assumptions:
1. The organization in question has a diverse product range.
2. The organization in question is sufficiently large such that engineering changes cannot be easily implemented by word of mouth.
3. For the organization in question, achieving high quality is of utmost concern.
4. The cutoff date/cutoff batch/cutoff machine for design change is extremely important.
5. The product manufacturing lead time is sufficiently large to effect long spares/raw material inventory.
Any mid-large scale manufacturing industry is always in constant state of self-improvement for its survival. Self-improvements might directly refer to value engineering (design changes, raw material wastage reduction, process improvements, quality improvements etc.) or to introduction of a new design all together. In our case, we are more concerned about the design changes which a company wants to implement. For an industry with a diverse range of products having large production quantities, such changes can be particularly difficult to implement. A few of the major problems include:
1. Inability of the organization to supply new drawings and remove old ones from all the workstations in its workshops.
2. Inability of the organization to supply new drawings and remove old ones to all the concerned vendors.
3. Inability of the organization to modify the designated standard production process according to change in the design.
4. Inadequate training of the workforce to identify changes in the drawings.
5. Inability of the organization to modify existing/manufacture new process aids (jigs/fixtures) to help implement the design changes.
The above problems can be solved by using a very flexible design change cycle. The cycle starts by the design department requesting the desired changes in any existing part. These changes are then passed on to the process engineering and development group. This group has representatives/experts from each core competence field of the company (Eg. Machining, Fabrication, Painting etc.). The design changes are then rigorously checked for their feasibility and manufacturing ease. The decision to manufacture the component in house or offload it to a vendor is taken by this group. If the product is to be manufactured in house, the group triggers the action by first information all the concerned shops (machining, fabrication etc.). Any change in the existing production aids design is reviewed as a priority. A review is conducted to check the cost of implantation of a design change w.r.t the importance/criticality of its implantation. All old drawings are collected and destroyed by the process engineering group. New drawings are issued with adequate control instructions. If any alteration needs to be done in the production process, then a process sheet is released (with adequate control instructions) detailing the minute details of the standard production process to be adopted.
The Quality Assurance department is tasked with updating the cutoff date/cutoff batch/cutoff machine in which the design change has been implemented. This is done to ensure that the spares manual is updated. In case the parts are made by vendors then similar process is adopted by the vendor support group of the process engineering group. Despite adequate checks in place, no system/process is fool proof as human error always comes into play. Thus, sometimes non implementation of design changes can result in creation of unsafe conditions, reduction in quality, high rework costs etc.
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