Adding Additional Layers to 3DEXPERIENCE Engineering Change Management

When talking about our 3DEXPERIENCE Engineering Change Methodology is broken down into four key stages:

1. Change Identification
2. Change Evaluation
3. Change Planning
4. Change Implementation

If you read the recent Change Management blog post or watched the recent Managing Engineering Change on-demand webinar then you learned about how the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform can be the home to your engineering change processes. We talked about using issues and change actions to drive and track the engineering change for our documents and CAD Data. Using what was shown in the webinar, raising issues would fall under Change Identification and change actions being related to Change Implementation. But what if we want to incorporate the remaining stages into our process and get even more stakeholders? Fortunately, the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform has additional ENOVIA Roles that help us do just that.

Change Methodology

3DEXPERIENCE Change Evaluation

Once an issue has been identified in the Change Identification phase, we can move on to Change Evaluation. During this phase, change requests can be created by any stakeholder to see if the raised issue has merit and is feasible to be implemented. Creating a change request allows for impact analyses to be formed, tracked, and vetted out before transition to the next phase.

The impact analysis can help to track the impact of a requested change in areas such as benefits, costs, risk, and implementation to make sure the requested changes are reasonable to justify the cost. Like other steps in the process, change requests can have associated affected items, members, and approvals. Using change requests lets all stakeholders have a say in the decision making process (to approve or deny) before any tangible work has begun on the project. This can act as the final check to take in the full scope of a change before transitioning to the next stage of the project.

Change Request

3DEXPERIENCE Change Planning

So, let’s say that after a change request has gone through the wringer of an impact analysis and all stake holders sign off to approve the request changes. This moves us to the next stage in our Change Methodology into the Change Planning stage. It’s at this point that our designated change coordinator can begin creating a change order for the project. Within the change order we can make additional change orders and change actions to successfully complete the change.

Change Orchestration

The associated change actions or orders can have their own individual due dates, severity, and affected items. With this level of control, our change coordinator is able to route specific actions to the relevant user or group that can best take care of the change. If multiple change actions are very closely related, they can be merged together into a single change action entry to reduce clutter and make it easier to see changes taking place. Ultimately, the change planning phase allows us to use the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform to track change orders and make sure multiple teams are guided through a formalized, trackable change process.

Additional 3DEXPERIENCE Engineering Change Management Roles

With the 3DEXPERIENCE engineering change processes, we want to make sure that it fits our current processes, allows for formally tracking changes, and also be scalable. For smaller changes being done to a project for a small team, working solely with change actions and the occasional issue is more than feasible. However, for larger projects with more teams working together it may make more sense to have a more formal, connected change methodology in place. Leveraging additional 3DEXPERIENCE Engineering Change Management, Evaluation and Planning Roles can help keep everyone on the same page.