Design Change Impact

Mitigating the Impact of Design Changes

Excess costs in designing, manufacturing, and servicing a product are often directly linked to poor management of change throughout the development process. Managing the important characteristics of a design within a CAD system gives engineers a clear view of what is important in a design as well as an understanding of the impact of change on the design.

The characteristics of the design are specialized to the type of design. For instance, in a composites design, the characteristics may include data such as ply orientation, ply sequence, ply geometry, or other unique traits of the laminate. In an airframe assembly, part locations, fastener callouts, and fastener grip lengths are among the data that may constitute the characteristics. In a simple detail part design the characteristics consist of the underlying geometric definition of the design and the annotations that are called out as part of its definition.

Managing the values of these characteristics through the evolution of the design brings clarity to the development process, making it possible to more easily understand the consequences of design decisions. This approach to characteristics definition and management also helps to ensure traceability of the requirements in the design and to make sure that they are reflected in the manufacture of the finished product.

Vistagy's solutions, including Fibersim™ composites engineering software, Syncrofit™ software for airframe assembly, and the Seat Design Environment™, enable engineers to easily document and interpret design changes at the feature, part or assembly level as design revisions transition to manufacturing and the supply chain. This helps to answer some of the common questions that occur during the development of highly engineered products, such as, &qout;What did I change?" and, &qout;Was the change important?&qout;

Without a strategy for addressing this level of awareness of the impact of change, the mechanical definition of the design can, and often is, affected by unintentional modifications that increase costs, delay delivery, and lead to poorly performing products.

This capability, which is built into Vistagy’s solutions, brings the mechanical design process to a level of control, robustness, and rigor that was previously unachievable. The trends toward model-based enterprises, complete product lifecycle management, and greater use of the capabilities of 3D CAD systems open the possibility of achieving a heretofore unattainable level of design discipline and control over the development process.