Engineering change management implementation at a South African defence company

Abstract

Engineering change management can be defined as controlling a change of a product when it is already released in production or has been previously produced. Engineering change management is a function of configuration management in the complex engineering environment. This research report is a case study on the engineering change process as it happens in a defence company in South Africa. A literature study on engineering changes is done, a theoretical pattern created for the study and then the literature is compared to an observation pattern that was created by collecting data from interviews and reviewing documents. The theoretical pattern is compared to the observation pattern using Trochim’s framework for pattern matching. The results are discussed and opportunities for improvement are given to the company.