Introduction: Why Data and Statistics Are Important in ECM
A well-functioning ECM process has the potential to contribute a wide range of positive effects for manufacturing companies. When product and process changes are handled efficiently with a seamless, well-structured process, it positively impacts many factors such as quality, cost, and time-to-market. This is especially the case when the ECM process is considered across the entire value chain and with a holistic approach involving stakeholders from across the business. Read more about it here: boostplm.com/enterprise-change-management
To realize that potential, it is crucial to fully understand your ECM process. It’s not just about having a well-defined and accessible process, but also about understanding how you are performing. This is where data and statistics come into play.
In this article, we will show you how tracking the right data can help you understand how your ECM process works, where challenges arise, and how you can improve it. We will also provide some examples of the measurements and statistics that are beneficial to work with.
What Should We Track and Measure?
To identify areas with improvement potential in your ECM process, it is necessary to track the process to understand how it operates and evolves. It is also relevant to ensure metadata is collected for your changes to identify patterns in recurring issues.
Some very relevant examples of parameters worth measuring in the ECM process are:
- Metadata for each change: Which product and which components are affected by the change? What is the reason for the change? There is a lot of metadata per change that is relevant to store so that you can look back over time. Once you have built a large enough amount of historical data on your changes, you will be able to use it to identify if certain components often cause issues.
- Lead time: How long does it take you to implement a change from start to finish? For example, from the time a request is submitted until the entire ECO is completed and closed. This can tell you how fast and efficient your process actually is—not just how fast it is on paper.
- Open vs. closed changes: How many changes do you open? And how many of them are closed? If the number of closed changes is lower than the number of opened ones, it could indicate a bottleneck somewhere in the process.
- “Old” changes: Which changes have been stagnant for (too) long? Do you have changes that have fallen between the cracks and been neglected?
- Bottlenecks: Where do changes often get stuck? Are there specific teams that have a lot of tasks or where tasks tend to pile up?
- Rejected or withdrawn changes: How many changes are either rejected or withdrawn after being initially approved? This can indicate poor prioritization, unclear requirements, or an insufficient impact analysis.
- Cost per change: What does it cost the company in terms of money, time, and materials to implement a change? This can be difficult to measure without the right tools and impact analyses, but it is important to understand.
Spotting the Challenges: Where Can We Improve?
When you begin collecting and comparing data from different relevant areas, you will start to see patterns that can provide insights. These patterns will show you where to pay attention in your ECM process and, in that way, also where to focus your efforts for optimization and improvement. It enables you to analyze where bottlenecks and delays occur in ECM.
It may turn out that something in your approval process is unnecessarily holding back many changes. Or there may be frequent delays in changes related to a particular supplier, or that a specific team in your organization is especially busy and doesn’t have time to manage change-related tasks.
There may be many hidden challenges and causes in the data and statistics related to your ECM process. The goal is not to point fingers at teams or individuals, but to identify areas where your ECM process is not working as well in practice as it might appear on paper. It’s about constantly improving and becoming more efficient in how you handle changes.
One of the first things we typically do when working with customers on ECM projects is to thoroughly examine the existing process. Here, we dive into data, statistics, and correlations that can explain all the corners and details of how the ECM process currently functions. This provides the best foundation for improvements based on facts and real-world practice—not just assumptions about where problems arise.
Real-Time Data: Use Dashboards to Make Data Accessible
Your data and statistics are unlikely to be valuable if they are not accessible to people in the organization. In addition to securing historical data for deep analysis, it is also important to ensure real-time data is broadly accessible to employees who deal with changes daily.
Dashboards can give you a live view of how you are currently performing in ECM. You can see how many changes are currently open, how long they’ve been open, what they concern, and who is working on them. This provides a usable overview of the current situation and whether action is needed. With dashboards, you can continuously monitor delays and spot new patterns in your performance.
A really good dashboard can be tailored to the individual employee or team, highlighting the most relevant information. For example, some employees may need a quick and easy overview of the tasks currently assigned to them and whether anyone is waiting on them. Managers may need to see performance at the team level. All of this should be presented in usable visualizations without unnecessary graphical clutter. Overall, it’s essential for your dashboards to be thoughtfully designed and user-friendly.
At BoostPLM, we have developed an ECM solution with a strong focus on data and statistics presented in dashboards that can be customized by and for each user. Read more about our solution here: boostplm.com/ecm-go.
Benchmarking in ECM: Compare and Assess Your ECM Maturity
Another useful tool for improving your ECM process is benchmarking and maturity assessments.
When you have data in place and a deep understanding of your current process—not just documented and identified, but also tested and analyzed in practice—you can more easily understand how you perform compared to other departments or even other companies. Benchmarking can give you a picture of whether your ECM process is already functioning well or if there are areas for improvement.
A maturity assessment can help with this as well. It provides an overview of how automated your ECM process is, or whether many elements are still manual. It can support an understanding of how much your decision-making is based on data and whether the process is well-defined or performed more ad-hoc.
At BoostPLM, our starting point for projects with customers is often a maturity assessment. This could focus specifically on ECM or be a more general assessment that spans multiple processes. Read more about our PLM strategic capabilities here: boostplm.com/plm-strategy.
How Do We Get Started?
If you haven’t previously worked with data in this way in your ECM process, getting started can seem like a big task. Here are a few tips on where to begin:
- Start collecting data: The foundation of everything is having enough data to identify patterns and connections that can provide useful insights. That means you need to start collecting data on your ECM process. Make sure the data is gathered in one place. Therefore, it’s also beneficial to have a dedicated system that consolidates all aspects of your ECM process—a solution that connects subprocesses and systems. At BoostPLM, we’ve developed ECM-GO for exactly this purpose. Read more here: boostplm.com/ecm-go.
- Start small: Begin by measuring and analyzing just a few metrics at a time. Start with two or three of the most relevant parameters and use them to practice incorporating data into your ECM management and development.
- Make it accessible: Create dashboards and start using them in the organization. Start with easy-to-understand dashboards that provide an overview and make them a part of your daily ECM work. For example, bring them into meetings and use them in your analysis and discussions. Changing employees’ mindsets to integrate data into their ECM management takes time, but it’s necessary and worth it.
- Use the right tools: There’s no need to make incorporating data and statistics into your ECM process more complicated than it needs to be. There are many great tools for different parts of the process. This includes tools for managing your ECR/ECO flow, as well as tools for data visualization and analysis. Our ECM solution offers both. It consolidates your flow in one place with integration to other tools and systems you use in ECM, while also making it easy to create dashboards and data visualizations based on a comprehensive search function with adjustable filters. Read more here: boostplm.com/ecm-go.
If you want to learn more about good ECM practices or about our own solution for managing ECM across existing systems and solutions, don’t hesitate to reach out. We are experts in the field and always happy to discuss ECM, and we’re always open to a non-binding, professional conversation.
You can also read more about general ECM here: boostplm.com/enterprise-change-management or about our solution here: boostplm.com/ecm-go.