{"id":335,"date":"2010-07-29T05:36:25","date_gmt":"2010-07-29T13:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.woodinnovation.org\/?p=335"},"modified":"2010-07-29T05:36:25","modified_gmt":"2010-07-29T13:36:25","slug":"research-brief-engineering-change-orders-ecos-an-important-engineering-performance-indicator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sim.sbio.vt.edu\/?p=335","title":{"rendered":"RESEARCH BRIEF: Engineering Change Orders (ECOs), an important engineering performance indicator"},"content":{"rendered":"
By Chao Wang, MS Candidate<\/em><\/address>\n
Department of Wood Science and Forest Products<\/em><\/address>\n
Virginia Tech<\/address>\n

What\u00a0are Engineering Change Orders (ECOs)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

ECOs are also called Engineering Change Notices (ECNs) or just Engineering Changes (ECs). ECOs\u00a0are a significant driver of product development costs and lead time (Loch and Terwiesch 1999). Engineering changes (ECOs) refers to making design changes to an existing product (Barzizza, Caridi, and Cigolini 2001). It includes changes for improving production efficiency as well as the changes for assuring product quality and performance (Balakrishnan and Chakravarty 1996).<\/p>\n

Types of ECOs<\/strong><\/p>\n

(Barzizza, Caridi, and Cigolini 2001) categorized ECOs as \u201cscrap\u201d, \u201drework\u201d, and \u201duse-as-is\u201d. \u201cscrap\u201d means serious technical faults and user safety problem and needs to be solved immediately. \u201cScrap\u201d will directly affect the work in progress (WIP) inventory since all these inventory cannot be applied to other products. \u201dRework\u201d means ECOs\u00a0are required for improvements of pre-change WIP without affecting finished products and components. \u201dUse-as-is\u201d means a product has no technical faults and user safety problem but need to improve product design.<\/p>\n

Engineering Performance of Furniture Industry<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Figure 1. Causes of Engineering Errors<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ECOs\u00a0are also one of the reflections of engineering performance in the furniture industry. According to our interview, furniture engineers spend over 50% of their available engineering time on issuing ECOs for late design changes and architecture modifications. ECOs could be classified as ECOs for engineering errors and ECOs for engineering improvements. Less engineering errors could not only ensure product quality, but also could shorten the time-to-market and reduce the production cost. In order to find what are the most frequently occurred errors, a Pareto\u00a0analysis could help us to have an idea on what the major contributors are. Figure 1<\/strong> showed a Pareto Analysis of the engineering performance of a solid wood\u00a0furniture company. The ECOs data\u00a0represents a\u00a0single month in that company. The number of ECOs issued for correcting engineering errors accounted for 98.67% of all the ECOS issued during this month. The rest 1.33% were ECOs for product improvements. From Figure 1<\/strong>, we could observe that \u201cdrawing error\u201d, \u201cpart dimension error\u201d and \u201cwrong selection of hardware\u201d take over 80 percent of the total engineering errors (most critical ones according to Paretto Analysis). Specifically, \u201cdrawing error\u201d accounts for 44% of all the errors. Followings are\u201d part Dimension Error\u201d which accounted for 32%, \u201cWrong selection of hardware\u201d accounted for 10%, \u201cHardware missing\u201d accounted for 9%, \u201cWrong numbers of hardware\u201d accounted for 3%, \u201cDimension missing\u201d and \u201cMissing drawings\u201d both accounted for 1%.<\/p>\n

Knowing\u00a0what are the major causes of engineering error is important because ECOs (for correcting the engineering errors)\u00a0are a type of waste which requires a lot of rework and iteration period. The Pareto Analysis\u00a0can help us to find the major causes, and then we could try to find effective methods to eliminate these wastes.<\/p>\n

Reference:<\/strong><\/p>\n