August 12, 2025
What do you call a change to a product? And no, this is not the start of a joke; it is a serious question. Do you call it an Engineering Change? If so, please consider stopping doing that.
A change to a product is almost never solely limited to an engineering scope. It will impact the supply chain, it will impact manufacturing, possibly your production line or facility, it might impact service and upgrades. It could be that people in manufacturing or in the field need to get certified to work on the resulting parts in question.
I heard about a company that got a request from an important customer to develop an improved version of an existing product. The customer requested a quote, and the company provided a quote solely based on the input from engineering. However, to be able to achieve the requirements of the customer, the product needed to be assembled in a clean room with ISO 14644-1 Cleanroom class 5. However, the current production facility was rated at class 8. You can probably guess what happened next. It was clear that a change request to the product also impacted the entire production facility of the company.
“The only type of change that exists in a company is an Enterprise Change.”
🖨️ Oh, this is “just” a print change.
Actually, that tolerance change means we have to modify the:
Not to mention, we have:
So, calling it an Engineering Change limits the scope, even if unintended, it limits how people view the change. That results in not looking beyond the engineering impact, not involving the right people to do an impact assessment, and ultimately resulting in a lot of extra rework, cost, and/or compliance issues.
It’s like calling something having an autopilot that does not function autonomously. People will make the wrong assumption and end up killing or hurting themselves or others. Words have meaning, and meaning guides our assumptions. An engineering change is just the engineering scope of a change, but there will likely be manufacturing scope, supply chain scope, and customer support scope related to the same change.
Changes almost always require cross-functional alignment, typos excluded. And you know what, having these cross-functional alignments helps the different functions to learn from other functions. This makes for a much more resilient and scalable organization, a well-oiled machine, ready for the next challenge.
So please, call it a change or enterprise change or anything that does not limit the scope by its terminology. If enough people do this, you will see that the assumptions made will also change.
What do you think?
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Copyrights by the Institute for Process Excellence
This article was originally published on ipxhq.com & mdux.net.
