What is an Engineering Change?
An engineering change enables businesses to create, review, and approve engineering change orders (ECOs). It quickly and efficiently deploys changes to the online store, such as new products, pricing updates, and content changes. This process ensures that changes are implemented properly and on time, which can reduce downtime and maintain customer satisfaction.
Significance of Engineering Change in E-commerce
An effective engineering change process helps streamline internet commerce to ensure updated information, more user-friendly environments and increased customer satisfaction.
- As an engineering change is often used for web feature updates and platform design modifications, it helps improve customer service and reduces errors.
- The process also helps prevent product launch delays and saves on unnecessary costs.
- The engineering change process ensures that changes to the launched products are implemented without causing disruption to the product.
How Engineering Change Works
The engineering change process works in the following steps:
- Firstly, any existing problem is identified, and the person responsible for this operation decides whether the company should implement a change.
- Subsequently, an engineering change request (ECR) is generated. The ECR helps understand:
- The necessity and feasibility of the suggested change
- Impacted documents and components
- Associated costs
- Once stakeholders approve the ECR, an Engineering Change Order (ECO) is generated. The ECO contains information about all components that are to be changed. It also suggests SOPs carry out the changes.
- Next, the ECO is sent for approval from all other stakeholders involved.
- Upon approval, the concerned team starts implementing the suggested changes.
Use Case With Engineering Change Process
Consider a company that has found a new cost-effective raw material for making one of its products. Therefore, to start using this material instead of the previous one, an ECO is generated. Once the ECO gets approved by all stakeholders, new production is started. Consequently, the product information is changed on all its boxes and its webpage.
