ActionWorks® Solutions for Manufacturing
Change Orders
Change Orders are a necessity of manufacturing, whether they are used as a strategy for keeping competitors at bay, for setting the pace of innovation, for satisfying customers, or simply for fixing product flaws. Fixing flaws, especially those that could lead to litigation, demands speed and thoroughness. In today's internationally competitive market, setting the pace of innovation for the entire industry means huge benefits: higher margins, increased quality, reduced costs by replacing less cost effective models more quickly, recognition for innovative leadership, increased market share, and overall lower risk. On the other hand, companies that fall behind the leader end up with two choices: proceed as scheduled and eventually offer products that are one to two years behind the competition, or stop and start over, which causes even more delays and represents more risk because of constantly changing market conditions and competitive offers.
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If you are not a leader, then the only way to combat these conditions is by dramatically reducing the time it takes to plan, design, develop, manufacture, and offer new and improved products. One way to accomplish this is by using change orders as a tactic for keeping products fresh while new major product innovations are under development. Change Orders effectively become a low cost method of responding to new competitive product introductions by enabling you to offer regular and timely updates.
Like any other core process, Engineering Change Orders require the coordinated decisions of participants from many different suppliers and departments, such as sales, marketing, engineering, procurement, finance, legal, QA, and manufacturing. In truck manufacturing for example, developing new products and enhancing existing ones covers changes to, or new designs of, engines, chasses, mirrors, heating, electronics, seats, axles, fuel fills, gauges, transmission, controls, welding, fenders, grilles, paint, and many, many other components. These cannot be handled in isolation. Even a small change may affect other areas of design, production, sourcing of parts, and production, not to mention cost. Tying all of these disparate groups together so the process can flow seamlessly across departments and corporate boundaries to customers and suppliers, requires a business process management system like ActionWorks® that is designed around the way people interact.
ActionWorks enables our customers to coordinate the complex web of negotiations, interactions, commitments, and data coordination across departments, companies, and the disparate IT systems associated with the Engineering Change Order process.
For example, Con Agra Grocery Foods Group adopted ActionWorks for managing the recipe change process for its over 2000 food products, from Swiss Miss hot chocolate to Peter Pan peanut butter. To retain product quality and consitency, typical approvals involve input from a large number of executives in multiple locations. ActionWorks software has reduced approval times by as much as 65%. In additional, the number of coordinators needed to manage the process has been reduced by 25% and all transactions and documents are archived and catalogued.
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