The purpose of this research project is to develop a framework for engineeringchange management (ECM) in an aircraft manufacturing company.ECM is vital for manufacturers to manage changes efficiently and effectively. Asan effective change control technique, ECM has been widely practiced indifferent industrial sectors. However, adopting an ECM process does not alwaysguarantee the agility of the manufacturing process of the manufacturer. Theperformance of ECM could be affected by the actual practice followed by theECM practitioner.The research was conducted in four phases. In the first phase an extensiveliterature review was carried out to understand the critical success factorsrelated to the ECM and Configuration Management (CM) activities.The second phase was to model the current ECM practice in the aircraftmanufacturing company by using IDEF0 approach. The actual ECM practicewas understood and some gaps were identified in this part.In the third phase, a survey was carried out to identify the best practices inaerospace and automobile companies. A list of best practices that couldpromote the performance of the ECM was identified by analysing the result ofthe survey.In the last phase of the research, a framework was developed from the model ofcurrent ECM process in the company. The best ECM practices identified in thethird part of the research were integrated into the model to refine the currentECM process. The framework was validated by experts in the aircraftmanufacturing company.The outcome of this research shows the correlation between the performance ofthe ECM process and the actual ECM practices. And the framework developedin this thesis can provide benefits for the further improvement of the currentECM process in the aircraft company. The framework also offers abenchmarking reference for other companies with a similar background toexamine their own ECM process and initiate improvement.
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