Engineering Change Management

Manage Engineering Change Risk with Aligni

Growing businesses embrace change and manage risk. Change is evidence of a growing, thriving organization. It doesn’t need to be stressful, anxiety-inducing or covered in red tape. With the right tools, you can manage risk and build confidence in your change process.

In these situations, Aligni has got your back. Our software is designed with a robust engineering change management component. This makes sure alerting, tracking, and verifying important changes are taken care of and risk is mitigated.

When producing products with high complexity or specificity, it’s hard enough for one person to manage one product build. It’s also difficult to remember all the twists and turns that brought them throughout the process. Introduce more products and add more team members and things become quickly unmanageable. For these reasons, processes have to be put in place to make sure all that knowledge is retained, managed and available to the people who need it.

Engineering change management (ECM) is that systematic approach to the documentation of changes from the identification of the required change, through the planning and implementation of the change, and culminating with the closure of the issue. ECM is the documentation process that tells this story for you – and Aligni is the software that makes the process easier and more accessible.

Engineering Change Visibility

Keeping track of engineering changes can be a daunting task. Aligni makes it easy to track down Engineering Change Orders (ECO) and Engineering Change Requests (ECR). Aligni’s main collection point for change orders and requests is found in their own dashboards within the Engineering perspective’s home page. Here, all open engineering changes are shown.

Aligni goes even further with change order and request management. The software displays all changes to a part or assembly in their respective pages found under the ‘Revisions’ tab. This area lists the priority, status and reason for the changes and when these happened historically.

These different locations help ensure that, no matter what the role within the company is, the right people will be informed when changes need to be made.

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Managing Affected and Related Parts

In most cases, an engineering change is related to one or more parts in your database. Aligni reduces the pain of locating all those affected parts and making the necessary changes.

For example, a component on a subassembly may no longer be available from a supplier due to an end-of-life or obsolescence event. Once this component is tagged with an ECR, not only is the request tagged under the specific part’s screen, the notification is shown in every build that uses that component.

With the built-in processes Aligni has, these change alerts can only be dismissed when every affected build has had their information updated with the part change.

Configurable control on ECM process and participants

Every company’s ECM process is different. Aligni is designed to be flexible to help our software adapt to our customer’s processes, not the other way around. The software can be set up to perform a set of steps within the ECM process that can mirror current processes. The process can be specifically staged and gated or made to be as streamlined as possible.

Aligni also offers the ability to structure who can do what in the process. It does this through a series of roles that have increasing access to making changes in the ECM process. Roles go from those who can just view the process, to collaborators, approvers and initiators who are granted increasing control over the process. This user structure helps make sure the right decisions are made by the right people.

Aligni’s engineering change management is built on decades of experience with best practices. Get started quickly with an out-of-the-box configuration that is flexible enough for small to mid-sized organizations. As you grow your team, collaborate confidently with Aligni’s role-based access control.

Whether you’re managing 50 or 50,000 components, keeping track of the changes that occur across the entire inventory and production operations can be tedious. Purpose-built change management software like Aligni can reduce errors. It can also help your team stay on top of critical issues.

Sign up for your free trial today! Learn how much easier the Aligni ECM process can be with the right tools.