Accelerating the process of engineering change orders: Capacity and congestion effects

Engineering change orders (ECOs) are important drivers of development costs and lean time, This article analyzes the process of administering engineering change orders in the case of the climate control system development within a large vehicle development project. This administrative process encompasses the emergence of a change (e.g., a problem or a market-driven feature change), its management approval, and final implementation. Despite strong time pressure, this process cart take several weeks, several months, and, in extreme cases, even over year. Such a long lend time is especially remarkable as the actual processing time for the change typically does not exceed 2 weeks. Based on our case study,, we develop art analytical framework that explains how such an extreme ratio between theoretical processing time and actual lean time is possible. The framework identifies congestion stemming from scarce capacity coupled with processing variability?,, as a major lean time contributor. We outline five improvement strategies that an organization can use in order to reduce ECO lend time, namely, flexible capacity: balanced workloads, merged tasks, pooling, and reduced setups and batching. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Inc.