Governing and Managing Customer-initiated Engineering Change – An in-depth case study of a global industrial supplier

Engineering change management is managing an alteration made to the technical system and/or its related value chain processes and documentation that has already been released during the product and process design process. The change can either emerge during the process or be initiated internally or externally by for instance customers. Managing initiated engineering changes is a vital source for improving product performance and radically reducing change costs. Customer-initiated engineering change is an area growing in importance decreasing product life cycles and increasing demand for customisation. Through an in-depth case study, this paper investigates which process and what governance setup is appropriate to manage customer initiated engineering changes, referred to as request management. The paper includes a proposal for a request management framework and a task-based iterative process model based on existing engineering change management theory and case study findings.