changemanagement

The Challenge. Today´s accelerated technology-driven markets have dramatically increased the need for rapid engineering change management. Companies are faced with increasing demand to rapidly respond to customers´ needs while maintaining efficiency and profitability. Most engineers are familiar with the headache caused by design changes; one minor adjustment to a part document can result in hours of related-document changes. Engineers waste time and money making adjustments to multiple documents and the design process lags. This can create a major competitive disadvantage as a product´s time-to-market is increased. The problem can be further amplified if a project is being collaborated across a geographically distributed work team. Unfortunately, most document management solutions operate from a centralized data repository, making these types of changes difficult to institute.

The Kinnosa Solution. The Distributed Change Management solution, powered by Kinnosa, provides engineers and manufactures with the tool they need to effectively manage and maintain the change process. Kinnosa automatically manages and coordinates changes to product configurations, software and documents across a distributed enterprise. This solution eliminates the need to manually coordinate data changes in multiple data systems. The Distributed Change Management solution extends change management and traceability to the next level, unifying the complete change process in a close loop system.

Distributed Change Management, powered by Kinnosa, allows you to identify, organize and review your changes while providing a means to control access to the change process. The workflow-driven processes ensure the right people are assigned the right tasks, while providing the information necessary to facilitate better impact analysis - faster and more efficiently.

Our innovative solution provides the ability to create engineering change requests (ECRs) and engineering change orders (ECOs) and associate them with impacted items, thus providing complete change traceability. Kinnosa was built with enhanced notification processes so it is easier to communicate ECOs without delay. This functionality allows businesses to:

• Assign tasks and route product change information across an extended enterprise.
• Establish task delay milestones that automatically trigger delay notifications.
• Ensure that only authorized changes and communications are transmitted.
• Maintain quality and meet customer requirements by streamlining change processes.

The Distributed Change Management solution goes even further by providing an instant snapshot of your change processes in order to coordinate and improve collaboration between distributed product teams. Users can:

• View the current status of changes to products or projects.
• See what´s being done, who´s doing it, which approvals are required, and when the project or product will be completed.
• Define event notifications based on the start, finish or standard time required to work on a task.

This feature allows organizations to capture pertinent cost information for changes throughout the engineering change cycle. This includes capturing change cost information by user defined categories that include recurring and non-recurring costs.

Why Is It Important? Improved engineering change processes generate higher product design efficiencies and better cost controls. The Distributed Change Management solution manages the change process from start to finish by automatically generating the change request and executing the approval process.

Kinnosa connects product teams as well as external suppliers to streamline change requests using the Internet. This increased level of collaboration ensures the proper transfer of information between distributed parties.

Companies need to be able to uniquely identify different variations or customizations of a product version and maintain related data to help maintainability and serviceability of the different product versions. The ability provided by Kinnosa greatly reduces maintenance and service costs, at the same time improving customer satisfaction. By using this solution module organizations can uniquely identify variations of a product and maintain changes across the product line.

To make proper and timely decisions, businesses need information quickly and organized in a comprehensive manner. The Distributed Change Management solution provides users with a single source record for engineering change information. Our customers can replace time-consuming manual processes with automated procedures. Kinnosa allows for a full impacted item analysis for change implementation based on form, fit and function changes. The solution will even send notices for overdue change orders. The system will integrate with product bill-of-material to easily identify parts that are impacted by an engineering change.

What Is The Value To Your Business? Distributed Change Management, powered by Kinnosa, is a revolutionary new solution that can ultimately increase profit margins, streamline processes and increase revenue and ROI. The benefits of an integrated and automated distributed change management solution are many and include the ability to:

• Generate higher product design efficiencies
• Develop better cost controls and save money
• Synchronize your extended product team
• Monitor progress and cost information to improve decision making
• Manage estimated and actual costs of engineering changes
• Compress product change cycle time for faster time-to-market
• Accelerate new product introductions
• Minimize product warranty claims
• Reduce errors in the engineering change management process
• Increase product sales and profit margins

Benefits of Kinnosa. Distributed Change Management, powered by Kinnosa, can provide benefits to your entire organization as well as outside partners that need the ability to change documents and data from multiple locations. Other solutions that compete with Kinnosa cannot make these same claims; they often rely on distributed data replication to handle distributed enterprises, whereby the data is modified and then copied to another location. This creates a problem when multiple worksites are working on the same project. Kinnosa provides real-time change management capabilities in a centralized manner, but with distributed capabilities. The benefits of this solution are many and include the ability to:

• Fully measure the impact of change
• Manage engineering changes effectively
• Facilitate communication and collaboration
• Manage multiple variations of the product
• Automatically generate change notifications
• Reduce scrap and rework
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Increase visibility to engineering changes

Post-Sales Product Support. First Trace is the only vendor that maintains a global call center, providing all levels of technical support when you need it most. We have fully dedicated and highly skilled support technicians assigned to support the call center activities. The call center is in operation during the main business hours of our global customers. There is no delay in initial response to problems. Palladium support plans can be customized to meet individual customer needs.

For more information about Distributed Change Management, powered by Kinnosa, and the evolution of document management, contact us or call +1 480.940.2363.