Change is ubiquitous in the often cited dynamic or turbulent environment (e.g., WIEN
-DAHL et al. 2007, YUSUF et al. 1999). Among others, changes occur on economic, social, and structural levels, in societies, in companies, as well as in engineered systems such as product or factory systems. For industrial enterprises, managing turbulence has no prospect on success, but coping with it – which means coping with change – does (CHAKRAVARTHY 1997, p. 77, FRICKE et al. 2000).
During the last decades, the complexity of these engineered systems increased signifi-cantly, hampering any attempts to deal with change in industrial enterprises. From an economic perspective, this fact also manifests in the rule-of-ten, stating costs of change to exponentially increase the later the change occurs during the life cycle of such a system (CLARK& FUJIMOTO1991). At the same time, legislative and quality require-ments increasingly encourage the application of structured approaches to address the everlasting challenge of handling changes effectively and efficiently (e.g., DIN EN ISO 10007, DIN EN ISO 9000). In addition, the progressive digitalization enables the creation and utilization of ever more extensive models of engineered systems (factories
1 Translated by the author. Original text in German: “Nur der Wandel bleibt” (REINHART& HOFF
-MANN2000)
2 Translated by the author. Original text in German: “Bleibt alles anders” (GRÖNEMEYER2000)
and products), which in turn leads to the challenge of harmonizing both changing digital models and changing real-world systems (e.g., PROSTEP IVIP E.V. 2015).
The importance of the challenge of coping with change cannot be overestimated, as results from a recent survey among more than 80 manufacturing companies (KOCH
et al. 2015b; see figure 1.1) and the following real-world examples of changes in different factory systems demonstrate.
Relevance of change management in manufacturing Challenges
Transparency about change stati
Figure 1.1: Importance of change management in manufacturing; related challenges and improvement potential (KOCHet al. 2015b)
Company Alpha3 intended to replace an aged, but well-functioning manufacturing resource with one of the latest models available to increase productivity and cut down energy consumption. As usual with these projects, the necessary invest has been proposed to and approved by production management after assuring technical feasibility. Once the new machine was installed, severe problems with the produced product component arose due to some specific configuration requirements the factory planners had not been aware of. After identifying these together with engineers responsible for the development of the affected product component, the machine had to be extensively reconfigured. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of dollars of
3 Name of company (and other companies mentioned in this thesis) changed by the author for reasons of confidentiality.
additional costs accumulated for acquiring replacement parts for the products, as well as for identifying and solving the technical issues with the new manufacturing resource.
In total, costs of change had almost doubled compared to initial cost estimations.
Company Beta acquired a new paint-spray line for a specific product component to improve painting quality and productivity. At the same time, the product engineering was able to implement some small specification changes to the product, so that painting the product component was no longer necessary. Both changes were implemented almost at the same time without prior information exchange during planning, leading to a high investment in a “soon-to-be-obsolete” machine.
These examples represent two rather large changes in manufacturing with severe consequences, but in practice actually a lot more changes occur – different in terms of, for example, scope, costs, or impact – but every now and then with similar, unexpected effects. The magnitude of manufacturing changes often reaches upper three-digit numbers per year for most manufacturing companies (KOCH et al. 2015b). In order to support companies to better cope with such changes, two major aspects have been in focus of engineering science: changeability and agility.
Innumerable publications investigated the phenomenon of changeability and closely related subsets such as flexibility, transformability4, adaptability, or reconfigurability (e.g., FRICKE & SCHULZ2005, WIENDAHL& HERNÁNDEZMORALES 2006, EL -MARAGHY 2009, RYAN et al. 2013). Together, these are sometimes referred to as
“ilities” (ROSSet al. 2008, DE WECKet al. 2011), which describe “an inherent system property” (BERNARDES& HANNA2009). In this context, multiple approaches have been developed to analyze, evaluate, or plan and design these system properties.5 In contrast, agility has been proposed as “an approach to organizing the system”
(BERNARDES& HANNA 2009) – i.e., the ability to quickly respond to anticipated or unexpected changes, exploiting and considering them as opportunities (DOVE1994, KIDD 1994, SHARIFI & ZHANG2001). Considered as an overarching approach for a whole company, agility comprises changeability (and its subsets) as one capability (e.g.,
4 In German publications the term “Wandlungsfähigkeit” is usually emphasized in this context.
5 For manufacturing: e.g., , CHRYSSOLOURIS(1996), HERNÁNDEZMORALES(2002), ABELEet al.
(2006), or MOURTZISet al. (2012); for product development: e.g., GUet al. (2004), FRICKE&
SCHULZ(2005), KASARDAet al. (2007), or ENGEL& BROWNING(2008).
WIENDAHLet al. 2007). Further relevant capabilities like proactiveness, competency, or quickness have been proposed by ZHANG& SHARIFI(2007).6
In product development, the concept of Engineering Change Management (ECM) has been investigated for several decades as the enabler to manage changes of and within the product system (Engineering Change (EC); HAMRAZ et al. 2013). From a product development perspective, this ability of managing ECs reflects the agility of a company (TAV ˇCAR & DUHOVNIK2005, p. 205). Several approaches on general ECM concepts, ECM processes, and ECs are available in scientific and practitioners literature (e.g., LINDEMANN& REICHWALD1998, JARRATT et al. 2011, VDA 2010a).
In manufacturing, different concepts have been proposed to contribute to the agility of a company. While approaches for factory planning can be utilized to plan changes (e.g., VDI 5200), especially the concept of continuous factory planning has been suggested as a control loop-based application of factory planning to monitor factories and identify required adaptations within the factory (e.g., CISEK2005, DASHCHENKO
2006, NYHUISet al. 2010). At the same time, approaches to actually manage changes in manufacturing have only been sporadically developed based on the direct application of ECM in manufacturing (e.g., AURICHet al. 2004, RÖSSING 2007, PROSTEP IVIP
E.V. 2015). Among the first to actually introduce the concept of Manufacturing Change Management (MCM) as the enabler to manage Manufacturing Changes (MCs) of and within the factory are PROSTEP IVIP E.V. (2014). Overall, only basic, purely ECM-based approaches are available for MCM, including simple concepts to describe MCs and rudimentary MCM processes. In industrial practice, this leads to heterogeneous approaches to deal with MCs, which often mainly focus on planning and implementing rather than actually managing MCs. Moreover, the variety of MCs leads to potential mismatches between available approaches and MCs causing, for example, additional work, deviations from standards, and long lead times. In consequence, this hinders the potential contribution to a company’s agility from a manufacturing perspective.
6 Note, that in contrast to most cited publications and also the understanding within this thesis, FRICKE
& SCHULZ(2005) consider agility as a subset of changeability.