Managing Design Change in Complex Production Development Project : A study at Scania Gearbox Assembly

Abstract: The speed of launching new products will accelerate and so the complexity of products and productions systems (Sorli et al 2006; Windt et al., 2008). Change is a natural effect of product development and it offers opportunities to develop the related production (Jarratt et al, 2011; Lager, 2002). To increase the launching, simultaneous development projects with a multi-project structure can be initiated (Araszkiewicz, 2017). This results in transmitted design changes from the product development project into the related production development project. In turn, the production development project needs to manage these transmitted design changes.  The study has investigated how transmitted design changes shall be managed in production development projects. This was performed by exploring theoretical fields of Engineering Change and Project Management and collecting empirical data from a studied complex production development project at Scania DT.  A standardized Transmitted Design Change process is recommended to use in order to achieve better communication in-between the interdependent projects and manage change with respect to risk and without harming other processes. Furthermore, project management methodologies and its characteristics were discussed in order to support and facilitate the management of transmitted design changes. The study concludes that both flexible and traditional project management methodologies shall be adopted in these complex development projects with high levels of interdependencies. The combined strategy supports changes and uncertainties with flexible iterations and controls the projects with standardized processes and structure.