Engineering Change Request
This is the process of recording a change to be made to an approved design together with its justification, its impact and its verification plan. The request defines in writing what will change, which documents it affects, whether it will be applied to products already in the field, and how the change will be verified.
The fields expected in a change request are these:
- Justification: is it a field failure, a supply problem, a cost study, or a new customer requirement.
- Scope: the affected schematic sheets, printed circuit layers, bill of materials lines, software modules and manual sections.
- Retroactive impact: are boards in the field affected by this change, is spare part compatibility broken.
- Verification plan: which tests will be repeated after the change.
- Effectivity: from which production batch it will be valid.
When this discipline is absent, the most common result is that boards carrying the same product name but behaving differently get mixed up in the field. A recorded change process makes it possible, when a question comes years later, to find the answer to "why does this board behave like this" in a document. Putting even the seemingly small fixes through the same path is the condition for the process to work.
The context in which this term is used: Our Services