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Bugaboo : engineering change management variables, decision cirteria and prioritization of ECR's

Veurink, Jasper (2012) Bugaboo : engineering change management variables, decision cirteria and prioritization of ECR's.

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Abstract:This thesis is written for Bugaboo and focuses on the area of Engineering Change Management within companies. The research is executed through an internship at the production facility of Bugaboo in Xiamen (China) and partly at the Head Quarter of Bugaboo in Amsterdam. Engineering Change Management (ECM) is a general concept within many companies in order to manage and coordinate Engineering Changes (EC) to products, parts or services. The process of ECM has effect on many different levels within a company and is therefore seen as disruptive to the normal routine process. It mainly starts with an Engineering Change Request (ECR) which can have effect on quality, cost price, outlook etc. of a product. These changes are considered as important because the output of these ECR’s have direct effect on the products that are responsible for the revenue of a company. This thesis focuses on the ECR process within Bugaboo regarding the sustaining products. The latter refers to products that are currently sold in the market. The main problems within the ECR process of Bugaboo are threefold. There is insufficient information for assessment on ECR’s. The description of ECR’s is too short and there are no good or reliable business cases of ECR’s. A second problem is that there are no decision criteria within the company to assess these ECR’s. It is therefore unknown when ECR’s should be accepted or rejected. The third problem is that there are too many accepted ECR’s which results in the fact that there is insufficient capacity to work on these ECR’s. Prioritization of accepted ECR’s is therefore required but a good and fixed methodology to support this process is missing. In this thesis, the three problems are analyzed through literature research and interviews with different actors of the ECR process. The aim is to design solutions that solve the problems mentioned above. A new business case is designed in order to support assessment of the profitability of ECR’s. To judge whether an ECR is profitable or not, the variables ‘effort’ and ‘added value’ of ECR’s are considered. With this business case, more vital information is available of ECR’s. This information supports decision making on ECR’s but also the prioritization of ECR’s. The second solution is the creation of decision criteria which are based on the product goals of the sustaining products and the profitability of ECR’s through the concepts ‘Cost of Waiting’ (COW) and ‘Pay Back Time’ (PBT). ECR’s should always reflect the product goals of the products, otherwise they will be rejected. Besides that, investments need to profitable within a certain time, otherwise it can be too risky. Therefore, the concepts COW and PBT are introduced on which the ECR’s can be assessed as well. The third designed solution is a methodology to support prioritization of ECR’s in order to create transparency about what ECR’s have the greatest impact on the company. Bugaboo wants to implement investments which have the greatest positive impact on their products. Assessment of approved ECR’s is therefore required in order to recognize the ECR’s which are the most profitable. This is the basis for the suggested solution of a prioritization methodology. The last designed solution concerns the ECR process. This process is partly redesigned in order to implement the designed solutions of this thesis.
Item Type:Essay (Bachelor)
Clients:
Bugaboo
Faculty:BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences
Subject:85 business administration, organizational science
Programme:Business Administration BSc (56834)
Link to this item:https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/61893
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