Reasons for Engineering Changes Affecting Part-specific Tools: An Investigation in the Automotive Industry

Engineering Changes (ECs) cause significant effort in the automotive industry. With increasing complexity and functionalities of vehicles on the one hand, and decreasing time to market on the other hand, managing ECs becomes more crucial. Especially ECs affecting part-specific tools consume much time and costs in the development of an automobile. To find strategies for reducing this effort, it is important to understand when and why ECs occur. Therefore, this paper first investigates the distribution over time of 3561 EC Orders (ECOs) of three vehicle development projects. A similar pattern with peaks after hardware development phases is observed. Second, the ECOs are categorized according to their reasons. The most frequent reasons are assembly problems, design, and geometric conflicts. Third, the share of reasons over time is analyzed. Whereas some reasons like cost reduction occur early in the development process, others like assembly problems or acoustics appear later. The authors suggest that some ECs with reasons like acoustics should be either done earlier or reduced e.g. through increased virtual validation whereas others with reasons like design should be done more efficiently.