Of JB’s recommended artists, the Josh Abbott Band was probably my favorite. I especially liked this one. I hope every man is lucky enough to know a girl like Texas. I’m lucky enough to have married a girl that grew up in Texas. They are something special.
We have been discussing the best ways to control design changes at work, and I thought it might present an opportunity to have more of an interactive discussion with my readers.
During my rounds as a 3rd party auditor, I have seen quite a few design control procedures. The most complex consisted of 19 procedures (NOT recommended, but there were no nonconformities). The most simple consisted of one 4-page procedure, which I wrote, but I would never recommend being this brief. I have created a couple of polls in my LinkedIn profile for you to respond to if you would like to share your own company’s “design control stats”:
The problem I see is that most projects are not new product designs. Sometimes the projects are not even major design changes. I think most changes involve supplier changes, component specification improvements, and design for manufacturability. These changes require review and approval of changes. These changes must also be recorded and retained as a Quality Record.
My own personal preference is to always open a design project—no matter how small the change is. In order to make the process flexible, I also prefer to define how many design reviews each project will have in the design plan rather than mandating that design reviews be held in a stage-gate fashion for 100% of projects.
Most companies will have a table of requirements with columns added to indicate if the requirements are mandatory for the project or optional. For example, “risk management plan needs to be updated? Yes/No.” I like this approach, because the table of requirements makes the decision making systematic.
Sometimes a change is only to a work instruction for a step in the manufacturing process. In these cases, some companies will use a document change order process to supplement the engineering change order process.
My feeling is that more complex products (i.e. – Class IIb & Class III in EU and Class III/PMA in US) will require more stringent design controls for the change. What does your company do to control design changes?
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QC is Dead 