A distributed change control workflow for collaborative design network
Introduction
The trend of component manufacturing has been changed from electronic manufacturing services (EMS) provider to joint development manufacturer (JDM). EMS is an industry based on providing contract design, manufacturing and product support services on behalf of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). However, all intellectual property of the new product belongs to the OEM. JDM is a company that helps design parts of a product for OEM customers. Unlike EMS, JDM may own the copyright of its design and provide joint design services to its OEM customer. The core competitions of JDM are joint design and productivity of manufacturing. Once basis requirement is hand-off from customer, JDM takes the job of completing the design, performs design verification, assembles and tests prototypes, assembles and tests qualification units, assembles and test proof manufacturing units, and finally produces the production units [6]. Lots of stakeholders have recognized that the earlier the manufacturer becomes involved in the design process, the better the product. When a product is outsourced to OEM, the OEM then outsources it to the lower tiers of JDMs, resulting in a design chain. In order to design a product, JDM has to joint design with its OEM customer and also collaborate with other JDMs in a design chain environment.
Design chain is a subset of supply chain. The major collaborative activities between suppliers and manufacturers are design activities. Therefore, how to manage the design flow in a design chain is as important as how to mange the material flow in a supply chain. Andi and Minato [1] pointed that around 50% of defective designs are caused by changes. It includes requirement changes, specification changes, design document changes, etc. They further showed that 44% of the 79 Japanese construction contractors experienced significant number of design document problems, while 10% had fewer and no experiences. According to the bullwhip effect theory, a slight change would cause huge changes along the supply chain. Therefore, how to control the changes of design documents for maintaining the consistence among design documents is a significant issue. Hameri and Bachy [4] also described that lack of discipline in design change control is one of the fundamental problems of not achieving the project goals.
In this paper, we propose a distributed change control workflow for maintaining the consistence of design documents among JDMs in a design chain. It is basically a workflow derived from the closed-loop change control process of configuration management II (CMII), a variant of configuration management (CM), and a distributed routing algorithm.
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review configuration management and routing algorithm literatures. The proposed distributed change control workflow is presented in Section 3. Section 4 presents the simulation result to validate the change control workflow. In the final section, we make a summary of our study, discuss the limitations, and suggest future researches.
Section snippets
Configuration management
Configuration management was first introduced by the US Department of Defense in 1992 [8]. It is a discipline applying technical and administrative direction, and a surveillance over the life cycle of configuration items to:
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identify and document the functional and physical characteristics of configuration items (CIs);
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control change of CIs and their related documentation;
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record and report information needed to manage CIs effectively, and the status of the proposed and approved changes and
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audit
Terminology
Definition of terminologies used in this paper:
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End-product: The final product designed and presented to the market.
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End-component: The final component, designed by a JDM, to be assembled as the final product.
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Sub-component: The component designed and produced to be assembled as the end-component.
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Configuration: Configuration items and their combination structure of a product.
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Configuration item: The object, such as a product component, to be selected as the controlling item in configuration
Validation and verification
We validated the proposed change control workflow by simulation. Each company in the collaborative design network acts as a router in the computer network. Each company can either send or receive the integration checking table via its related companies listed in its collaborative design table. The inter-company configuration and proposed distributed change control workflow have been implemented with Java RMI applications. Whenever one company receives a collaborative design table from its
Conclusion and discussion
Rapid product design is one of the key approaches for maintaining the competitiveness of an enterprise. In order to focus on the core competencies, outsourcing the nonvalue-adding activities is the trend of today's supply chain. Therefore, a distributed changed control workflow is developed in this paper. The potential combination of the closed-loop change control process proposed in CMII (a social science perspective) and distributed routing algorithm (a computer science perspective) are
Acknowledgement
This work is supported in part by the National Science Council of Republic of China under the grant NSC 94-2213-E-033-015.
Jiun-Yan Shiau is an assistant professor of industrial engineering in Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan. He received a MS and PhD on industrial engineering from Arizona State University. His research interests include CM, PDM, new product development, software engineering, and distributed problem solving.
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Cited by (0)
Jiun-Yan Shiau is an assistant professor of industrial engineering in Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan. He received a MS and PhD on industrial engineering from Arizona State University. His research interests include CM, PDM, new product development, software engineering, and distributed problem solving.
Hui Ming Wee is a professor of industrial engineering in Chung Yuan Christian University. His research interests are in the field of production/inventory control, optimization, creative-problem solving and supply chain management. His research has attracted significant awards and funding from the National Research Council and the Ministry of Education and Economics in Taiwan.