BPM-driven construction client requirements change management

Changing client requirements is one of the principal factors that contribute to delays and budget overruns of construction projects which as a result causes claims, disputes and client dissatisfaction. Change management ensures that such changes are handled through a properly coordinated and controlled process and retained throughout the project life cycle. This paper presents an empirical study that investigated the potential for an automated process of managing changes to clients’ requirements in construction projects. An initial focus group meeting was set up as a preliminary study which was followed by two case studies. Participant observation was used to conduct the case studies during which technical documents were also reviewed. The results show that current requirements change management process lacks efficiency. The paper concludes that business process management (BPM) approach could be a solution to better manage the requirements change process

Reference Architecture for Collaborative Design

Issues and themes of Collaborative Design (CD) addressed by research done so far are so extensive that when running a project of collaborative design, people may lack directions or guidelines to support the whole picture. Hence, developing reference architecture for CD is important and necessary in the academic and the empirical fields. Reference architecture provides the systematic, elementary skeleton and can be extended and adapted to diverse, changing environments. It also provides a comprehensive framework and enables practices implemented more thoroughly and easily. The reference architecture developed in this re-search is formed along three dimensions: decision aspect, design stage, and collaboration scope. There are five elements in the dimension of decision aspect: (1) participant, (2) product, (3) process, (4) organization, and (5) information. The dimension of design stage includes three stages: (1) planning and concepting, (2) system-level design and detail design, and (3) testing and prototyping. The dimension of collaboration scope includes three types of collaboration: (1) cross-functional, (2) cross-company, and (3) cross-industry. Because of the three reference dimensions, a cubic architecture is developed. The cubic reference architecture helps decision-makers in dealing with implementing a CD project or activity. It also serves as a guideline for CD system developers or people involved in the design collaboration to figure out their own responsibility functions and their relations with other members. Demonstration of how to use the reference architecture in developing design collaboration activities and specifying the details for cross-company CD is also provided in this research

Implementación de un modelo mejorado para la efectiva introducción de primeros artículos estructurales en la industria aeroespacial

T3-2020En Gulfstream Mexicali, el Departamento de Soporte Estructural está conformado por un grupo de Ingenieros que brinda atención directa al sistema de introducción de primeros artículos. Ellos tienen a su cargo actividades para cada nuevo número de parte, dependiendo del tipo de producto y los procesos que conlleva. Una vez que toda la cadena de primeros artículos termina su trabajo, la orden se libera e inicia el proceso de manufactura del número de parte. Para fines de este proyecto, se centrará la atención en las escalaciones reportadas en el 2019 de cada una de las unidades de negocio estructurales. Este proyecto tiene como el objetivo general el analizar la problemática identificada en los soportes requeridos en las órdenes de producción de las unidades de negocio estructurales. El sistema de introducción de primeros artículos se evaluó y se generó una propuesta de mejora de este proceso a través de un modelo de validación de nuevos productos que asegure que al menos un 90% de las órdenes de producción no requieren soportes y fluyen sin inconvenientes a lo largo de su manufactura, garantizando la calidad del producto y eficiencia del proceso. Logrando que el métrico de soporte sea menor o igual al 10%. A lo largo de este documento se describirán las investigaciones realizadas y cada una de las actividades sustentadas en la metodología de tres fases principales para lograr responder la pregunta de investigación, ¿Cómo puede el departamento de planeación de manufactura de Mexicali reducir los soportes en las órdenes de producción de las unidades de negocio estructurales del proceso de introducción de primeros artículos? Finalmente se concluyen los resultados satisfactoriamente obtenidos, impactando positivamente a la empresa y a la comunidad de Mexicali.Maestrí

Amélioration du processus de gestion des demandes de changement d'ingénierie dans le domaine de la construction

RÉSUMÉ : Les changements d’ingénierie sont courants dans tous les grands projets de construction. Les projets doivent fréquemment être modifiés. De longs délais sont parfois observés lors du traitement des demandes de changement d’ingénierie et ces délais ont parfois un impact critique sur les coûts d'un projet. Ce mémoire débute avec l’identification de problématiques réelles rencontrées dans une grande entreprise de génie-conseil œuvrant dans la gestion de grands ouvrages. Par la suite, une étude de l’état de l’art a permis de diriger les travaux en soulevant les failles présentes dans les recherches. Les objectifs de la recherche consistent à proposer une amélioration du processus de gestion des changements d’ingénierie dans le but de réduire le temps de traitement et de présenter de nouveaux indicateurs de performances reliés à la gestion des changements d’ingénierie. La modélisation du processus de gestion des changements d’ingénierie a servi de base pour la création du processus amélioré. En séparant le processus en deux sous-processus, l’analyse des résultats de la simulation a permis d’observé des diminutions en temps de traitement de l’ordre de 43% pour la section DCN (Designe change note) lié majoritairement à l’ingénierie. La section PCN (Project change note), liée à la partie administrative, a bénéficié de 5% de réductions. D’autres scénarios ont été testés : la diminution des jours disponibles au traitement des ECs (engineering changes), la variabilité appliquée au temps de traitement et la variation du taux de changement. Dans tous les cas, le processus amélioré se comporte mieux que ce soit en temps de traitement, en temps de traitement à valeur ajoutée ou en temps d’attente. On peut même démontrer qu’un taux d’arrivée d’un changement par semaine ou moins est souhaitable. En effet, le temps de traitement cesse d’augmenter quand le taux d’arrivée est plus faible qu’un EC par semaine. Il n’y a donc presque plus d’attente due à une ressource utilisée par un autre EC. Du côté des indicateurs de performance, l’étude montre que le SPI (Schedule performance index) peut fausser les décisions des gestionnaires en ne prenant en compte les ECs que lorsque leur traitement est complet. En effet, l’indicateur est calculé mensuellement, il peut donc se passer trois mois avant que le changement affecte l’indicateur de performance. Les nouvelles méthodes de calcul impliquent donc des points critiques au départ du processus de gestion et à la fin de la section DCN. Ceci permet de calculer un SPI de manière plus précoce pour tenter d’avertir plus rapidement les gestionnaires de la quantité des changements à survenir.----------ABSTRACT : Engineering changes are common in all major construction projects. Projects must often be modified. Indeed, long delays are sometimes observed during the engineering change management process and these delays can have a critical impact on project costs. Therefore, this thesis begins with the identification of actual problems encountered in a large engineering consultancy firm involved in the management of large scale projects. Subsequently, a state of work analysis is used to direct the work by highlighting the vulnerabilities present and proving that there must be an innovative solution to resolve the problems encountered in the partner company. The objectives of the research are then defined and these consist of improving the engineering changes to the management process to reduce the processing time and to propose new performance indicators used in the management of engineering changes. The business process is the base of the creation for the improved process. By making a distinction between the two sub-processes, the analysis of the simulation allowed the identification of a reduction in the treatment time by 43% of the sub-process linked to the engineering task (DCN). The sub-process PCN got a treatment time reduced by 5%. Other simulations were made. These are: reduction of days available for the treatment of ECs, different variability applied to the time of the treatment and the variation of the rate of input of ECs. In all the scenarios, the improved process behaves better than the actual process in terms of time of treatment, value added time or waiting time. It is even possible to conclude that with rate of one EC per week or less the treatment time does not vary much even though the rate is getting lower. At those rates, the waiting times due to resources are almost inexistent thus the lower gain of time. As for the performance indicators, the study showed that the SPI could misguide the directors because it does not includes the ECs in process. Since the indicator is calculated on a monthly base, it is possible to have a three month window before an ECs is included in the calculus. The new methods proposed try to use checkpoint in the beginning of the EC process and in the end of the sub-process DCN. This allows using an SPI that shows earlier detection of problem since the ECs are included sooner. The managers can have a better understanding on what is really going on in their projects

Integrated lifecycle requirements information management in construction

Effective management of information about client requirements in construction projects lifecycle can contribute to high construction productivity; within budget and schedule, and improve the quality of built facilities and service delivery. Traditionally, requirements management has been focused at the early stages of the construction lifecycle process where elicited client requirements information is used as the basis for design. Management of client requirements does not extend to the later phases. Client requirements often evolve and change dramatically over a facility’s life. Changing client requirements is one of the principal factors that contribute to delays and budget overruns of construction projects. This results in claims, disputes and client dissatisfaction. The problems of current requirements management process also include: lack of integrated and collaborative working with requirements; lack of integrated requirements information flow between the various heterogeneous systems used in the lifecycle processes, and between the multiple stakeholders; inefficient and ineffective coordination of changes within the lifecycle processes; manual checking of dependencies between changing requirements to facilitate assessment of cost and time impact of changes. The aim of the research is to specify a better approach to requirements information management to help construction organisations reduce operational cost and time in product development and service delivery; whilst increasing performance and productivity, and realising high quality of built facilities. In order to achieve the aim and the formulated objectives, firstly, a detailed review of literature on related work was conducted. Secondly, the research designed, developed and conducted three case studies to investigate the state-of-the-art of managing client requirements information. A combination of multiple data collection methods was applied which included observations, interviews, focus group and questionnaires. Following this, the data was analysed and problems were identified; the necessity for a lifecycle approach to managing the requirements information emerged. (Continues...)

Investigation of a design performance measurement tool for improving collaborative design during a design process

With rapid growth of global competition, the design process is becoming more and more complex due largely to cross-functional team collaboration, dynamic design processes, and unpredictable design outcomes. Thus, it is becoming progressively more difficult to support and improve design activities effectively during a design process, especially from a collaboration perspective. Although a great deal of research pays attention to the support and improvement of design collaboration from multi-perspectives, little research attention has been directed at improving collaborative design by a performance measurement approach. In addition, many studies have demonstrated that performance measurement can improve design effectiveness significantly. Therefore, this PhD research focused on investigating ‘How to improve collaborative design via a performance measurement approach?’ A Design Performance Measurement (DPM) tool, which enables design managers and designers to measure and improve design collaboration during a design process, has been developed. The DPM tool can support the design team members in learning from performance measurement and, in turn, drive the design project towards the achievement of strategic objectives, and goes beyond monitoring and controlling them during the project development process. It is, thus, a motivating tool as well as a support tool for the development of product design. The proposed DPM tool has three novel components: • A DPM operation model, which integrates a hierarchical design team structure with a multi-feedback interaction performance measurement approach to support DPM operation in a design project team. • A DPM matrix, which enables collaborative design performance to be measured during a design process. • A DPM weighting application model to improve flexibility of the DPM tool by integrating DPM with the design project’s strategies, stage-based design objectives, and design staff’s job focuses and responsibilities. This tool has been positively evaluated through two industry case studies and a software-based simulation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The career pursuits of engineering students : inquiries into options, informedness, and intentions at the education-careers interface

Thesis: Ph. D. in the field of Engineering Workforce Dynamics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Mechanical Engineering, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis examines how the career plans of U.S. engineering students shape the composition of the engineering workforce. The health of this workforce - including its demographic diversity and inflow of candidates with key skills - attracts substantial attention from employers, policymakers, and educators. Prior literature has identified patterns of systemic variation in career intentions among students in the engineering educational pipeline, where certain student subsets have exhibited a lower likelihood of pursuing traditionally categorized engineering occupations after engineering school compared to others. Examining these patterns of occupational intentions remains critical, as some of such patterns continue to hinder workforce development goals, including demographic diversification and retention of those with certain skills profiles. We began our investigation by constructing a multivariate occupational sorting model for engineering students that incorporates factors shown in prior studies to be associated with students' occupational outcomes. We empirically validated this model using survey data from a sample of 1,061 senior year engineering students. We present results showing how different occupational outcomes are associated, on average, with different student-specific characteristics. Next, we describe findings from a randomized survey experiment conducted upon the same student sample. Here, we investigated how experimental manipulation of engineering job attributes influences students' preferences for jobs. The experiment allowed us to draw causal inferences about how jobs' attributes interact with students' characteristics to explain variance in job preferences. We discuss the experiment's implications for enhancing candidate-career matching and for mitigating undue attrition from the engineering pipeline. We also present results from a systematic literature review examining the changing careers landscape faced by engineering students. Here, we identified core elements of traditional engineering jobs that endure in contemporary positions, and we characterize a set of increasingly prevalent engineering-related jobs that has arisen. We present a typology of engineering work built upon the review. The typology facilitates categorization of the engineering-relatedness of engineering graduates' diverse careers. We conclude by discussing how increased job market complexity strains engineering schools' ability to prepare students to make well-informed career decisions, and draw upon findings from the survey experiment to suggest ways that educators can remove impediments to ideal student-career matching.by James N. Magarian.Ph. D. in the field of Engineering Workforce Dynamic

Engineering change modelling using a function-behaviour-structure scheme

Some of the work contained in this dissertation has been published and presented as below: - B.Hamraz, N.H.M.Caldwell, D.C.Wynn, and P.J.Clarkson, (2013): Requirements-based Development of an Improved Engineering Change Management Method. Journal of Engineering Design, online first, DOI: 10.1080/09544828.2013.834039. - B.Hamraz, N.H.M.Caldwell, and P.J.Clarkson, (2013): A Holistic Framework for Categorisation of Literature in Engineering Change Management. Systems Engineering 16 (4). - B.Hamraz, O.Hisarciklilar, K.Rahmani, D.C.Wynn, V.Thomson, and P.J.Clarkson, (2013): Change Prediction Using Interface Data. Concurrent Engineering 21 (2), pp. 139-154. - B.Hamraz, N.H.M.Caldwell, and P.J.Clarkson, (2012): A Multi-domain Engineering Change Propagation Model to Support Uncertainty Reduction and Risk Management in Design. Journal of Mechanical Design 134 (10), pp. 100905.01-14. - B.Hamraz, N.H.M.Caldwell, and P.J.Clarkson, (2012): A Matrix-calculation-based Algorithm for Numerical Change Propagation Analysis. Transactions on Engineering Management 60 (1), pp. 186-198. - B.Hamraz, N.H.M.Caldwell, and P.J.Clarkson, (2012): FBS Linkage Model – Towards an Integrated Engineering Change Prediction and Analysis Method. Proceedings of the International Design Conference (DESIGN'10), Dubrovnik, Croatia, pp. 901-910.Engineering changes are unavoidable and occur throughout the lifecycle of products. Due to the high interconnectivity of engineering products, a single change to one component usually has knock-on effects on other components causing further changes. This change propagation significantly affects the success of a product in the market by increasing development cost and time-to-market. As such engineering change management is essential to companies, but it is a complex task for managers and researchers alike. To address this challenge, the thesis at hand investigates the state-of-the-art of research in engineering change management and develops a method to support engineering change propagation analysis, termed FBS Linkage. This method integrates functional reasoning with change prediction. A product is modelled as a network of its functional, behavioural, and structural attributes. Change propagation is then described as spread between the elements along the links of this network. The FBS Linkage concept is designed based on a comprehensive set of requirements derived from both the literature and industry practices as well as a comparative assessment of existing change methods and functional reasoning schemes. A step-by-step technique of building and using an FBS Linkage model is demonstrated. The method’s potential benefits are discussed. Finally, the application of the method to two industrial case studies involving a diesel engine and a scanning electron microscope is presented. The method evaluation indicates that the benefits of the method outweigh its application effort and pinpoints areas for further refinement.This work was supported partly by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and partly by the Transatlantic Partnership for Excellence in Engineering (TEE)