To better compete in quickly advancing industries, companies need to accelerate how products get to market. Offering new technologies first helps companies gain an edge over the competition; and becoming more efficient without sacrificing quality creates an opportunity to pass savings on to customers with better-value offerings while investing critical resources into the next innovation.
But gaining these advantages means increasing the velocity of change across your organization. And increasing the speed and volume of changes is not only difficult: it may also leave you open to risks, depending on how you manage change today.
It’s no surprise that manual processes to manage change and design reviews take up valuable time and leave teams open to risk. Have you ever had that “This could’ve been an email!” feeling? Design review meetings take up teams’ time preparing custom reports to review changes. This is essential, of course, to thoroughly analyze the impact of any change and to gain approval from the multitude of stakeholders all impacted by a single change. But despite all this effort, teams could still be exposed to risk due to the manual nature of the process, if it takes place outside the digital thread of product information. It might even be hard for organizations to judge how much time is wasted in this work: doing so sounds like another report (and another meeting!) to me.
Aras has a better way. Check it out in the video below; or, view the full-length demo here: Accelerating Product Development with Collaborative Design Review.
So why all the manual work? It must be important, if so many teams are stuck doing it. Of course, it’s to reduce any hint of risk that the change might introduce. But we can reduce the risk without all the overhead? Let’s see how:
Change affects more than just the item being changed.
Change is cascading: it affects parts in the product hierarchy both “above” (parents) and “below” (children) the part being changed. That’s why Aras offers the Impact Matrix to automatically draw the items above and below the part into the change process, to fully demonstrate the impact of the change during design review.
Change impacts more people than just the one creating the change.
Any stakeholder with a role in the change should have visibility into the change being considered, which is why Aras change management kicks off notifications to individuals involved in the change process, to let them know it’s happening. For a demonstration of the Impact Matrix and Notifications in Aras Change Management, check out this video + blog.
Change impacts product quality.
You don’t want to initiate a change without checking out its impact on the product’s quality. Teams involved in quality planning (design FMEA) and manufacturing process planning (process FMEA) also receive notification that a change has taken place. Check out this demo to see the quality-change connection in Aras Innovator.
Change is under close scrutiny.
With so much at stake, everyone in the organization has their eyes on change: from top executives who need to understand how efficient or costly change processes are, to managers who need to understand and maximize their team resources in improving products; to end-users who need to know their day-to-day tasks. This full-length demo, Accelerating Product Development with Collaborative Design Review, and the video above, both show clearly how each role can create and view reports against change processes in Aras Innovator, from the highest levels of performance across the organization to the everyday tasks of individual engineers.
Change shouldn’t include workarounds.
Keeping critical changes “outside the system” – in workarounds like emails, chat tools, and other manual processes – introduces risk to the change process. To see how Aras Innovator lets users keep all discussions about changes in-context with product development data and internal to the system, preserving both “tribal knowledge” and discussions alongside formal change processes without compromising the security of your data and processes, check out this video + blog on Collaboration in Aras Innovator.
If you’ve ever felt like “this could’ve been an email”, check out one of our many Change Management resources above. Or, download Aras Innovator here to try change management out for yourself.