Autor: Frederik König

The fact that the ramp-up phase is a highly critical and economically important stadium within the product lifecycle for both suppliers and OEMs implies that an efficient product change management is applied to meet the goals of cost, quality, and time. This article introduces a combined management concept called hybrid product change management. By recombining existing management solutions, such as the standard processes matching certain product change types and the product change processes based on process elements, enterprise networks are enabled to coordinate all product change projects. This aspect is described further by giving an idea of how this hybrid product change management can be supported in terms of information and communication technology and knowledge management.

The handling of complex technical changes still is a highly critical process within the industrial practice. Hence, it very often comes to critical scenarios concerning key operating figures like time, product quality or expenses, which troubles the coordinated start of operations or the running of serial production. The aim of the article is to introduce a bundle of methods, which helps to integrate the process- and product views of the different engineering partners, in order to increase transparency and efficiency for the collaborative processing of product changes within engineering networks.