In recent years, every manufacturer has been facing a growing number of changes to the products they produce. This is primarily driven by customers’ efforts to optimize costs. Each design, technological, or engineering change triggers dozens of actions that must be carried out across different areas of the company—most notably engineering, logistics, purchasing, quality, and production. The latest editions of ISO 9001 and IATF standards leave no doubt that proper management of the change implementation process is a critical component of organizational success.

Depending on their level of maturity, companies typically apply one of two approaches to this challenge. In less developed organizations, the entire process is based on communication during meetings. Those that have already experienced the consequences of poorly managed change processes—such as customer complaints or special statuses common in the automotive industry—attempt to organize the process by introducing a change implementation form containing a list of potential actions. Maintaining such processes results either in a significant workload for the person responsible for supervising change implementation (chasing others, collecting signatures, etc.) or in merely superficial oversight—the form “exists,” there are “some signatures,” but in reality the organization relies on the assumption that people “will remember” and “will do it.” Companies that understand how costly the lack of proper supervision can be tend to increase the frequency of meetings, eventually concluding that an IT tool providing real-time information on implemented changes is essential. These companies implement dedicated solutions—such as ours.

The need to create a tool for supervising change implementation arose in our company several years ago as a direct result of requests from existing customers. Together with several of the largest manufacturers of various products, we formed working groups consisting of engineering staff, project managers, logistics, quality, and production representatives. Within these teams, we developed the specification of a tool that we now implement in companies in Poland and around the world.

The main benefits of implementing the module include:

• a single register of all implemented projects
• a standardized process requiring completion of predefined steps, with the ability to make individual decisions regarding whether specific actions are necessary
• quick access to the current status of all actions related to each implemented change
• every employee assigned a task related to a change project is notified by email and gains access to all relevant documentation (e.g. drawings); they can also check the status of actions performed by other departments involved in the project at any time
• responsible persons can attach evidence confirming that their actions have been properly implemented
• the ability to track project timelines using a Gantt chart

If our thoughts on the module described above have caught your interest, contact us via the contact form. We will arrange a short, free-of-charge presentation of our system’s capabilities—either at your company or online.