In October, our ECM-Go solution officially went live at HydraSpecma, becoming the company’s shared platform for managing engineering changes across its global organization. This milestone marks an important step toward more structured and efficient change management processes. In fact, it ensures that changes are carried out with the right quality and at the right time.

From Manual Processes to a Centralized Platform

Before implementing ECM-Go, HydraSpecma’s engineering change management process was largely manual. While functional, it was time-consuming, exposed to errors, and lacked the level of efficiency required to support a complex product portfolio.

With ECM-Go, all documentation related to engineering changes is now centralized in one system. This provides:

• Greater transparency across departments
• Improved traceability of changes
• Reduced risk of errors
• Faster and more reliable execution
• Increased adaptability to customer requirements

By digitalizing and standardizing the process, HydraSpecma has strengthened its ability to respond quickly and correctly when a customer requests a change — a critical factor in today’s competitive manufacturing environment.

A Testimonial from HydraSpecma

In the video testimonial below, Ivan Grabovac, Manager for PDM and ECM at HydraSpecma, shares insights into the implementation journey and the impact of ECM-Go on their daily operations.

We are proud of the collaboration and grateful for the trust HydraSpecma has placed in us. Watch the full testimonial to discover how ECM-Go supports high-quality, timely, and transparent engineering change management.

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Why “Engineering Change” No Longer Describes How Change Really Works

Did you know that studies repeatedly show that up to 30 percent of engineering effort can be consumed by change-related rework when downstream consequences are discovered late?

In many engineering-led organisations, the term “engineering change” is still widely used. However, it increasingly fails to describe how change actually unfolds in modern product companies.

What begins as a change to a product design often triggers further design changes. These, in turn, propagate into development activities, verification and approval processes, production, service, and the supply chain. As a result, changes rarely remain confined to engineering.

This is why many organisations are no longer dealing with engineering change in isolation, but with enterprise change management: changes whose consequences span multiple functions, systems, and stages of the value chain.

Studies and industrial experience consistently indicate that when the impact of change is not understood early, organisations pay for it later. Longer lead times, increased rework, quality issues, and avoidable costs are common outcomes. In some environments, it has been observed that up to 30 percent of engineering effort may be consumed by change-related rework when downstream consequences emerge late.

In most cases, the issue is not the change itself, but the point at which its impact becomes visible.

 

Planning and Time-to-Market: Why Plans Often Break Down Without Impact Analysis

In Lean Product Development, optimistic planning assumptions are recognised as a source of waste. Decisions made without sufficient understanding of consequences may appear reasonable initially, but tend to unravel during execution.

Change planning is particularly exposed to this risk. Without impact analysis, it becomes difficult to estimate lead time, assess resource availability, sequence work effectively, or anticipate downstream constraints.

Changes compete not only on importance, but also on when and how they consume scarce competencies. An organisation may have the necessary skills available in principle, yet find them fully committed elsewhere. The resulting waiting time contributes directly to longer lead times and reduced predictability.

Without a clear understanding of change propagation, time-to-market estimates often rest on hope rather than control.

 

Change Propagation in Design

Change propagation frequently begins in design, but not all design impacts are equally visible.

Some impacts are relatively straightforward to identify, such as direct changes to the bill of materials. Others are more subtle. Geometric and interface-related changes often require detailed CAD analysis, while system-level or architectural impacts demand broader system understanding rather than inspection of individual artefacts.

The more abstract the dependency, the easier it is to overlook. Research into change propagation suggests that design changes can spread in non-linear ways, where seemingly minor modifications give rise to disproportionately large downstream effects.

 

Propagation into Development, Verification, and Approval

Design changes seldom end with updated drawings or models. They propagate into development work, affecting task definitions, sequencing, and resource allocation.

Changes frequently influence test scope, verification activities, and formal approval processes, particularly in regulated environments. When such implications are identified late, rework and retesting become unavoidable, often under significant time pressure.

Many schedule delays attributed to “engineering issues” originate at this stage, rather than in the initial design activity.

 

Propagation into Production and Service

Once the consequences of a change reach production or service, organisational flexibility is significantly reduced.

Typical impacts include modifications to tooling and fixtures, changes to production processes, updates to work instructions and documentation, and adjustments to service procedures and spare parts.

At this stage, even modest oversights can prove costly. Late discoveries are difficult to reverse and may result in temporary workarounds, quality risks, or delayed product launches.

 

Logistics and Supply Chain Effects

The effects of change on logistics and the supply chain are often underestimated.

Changes may result in obsolete or scrapped inventory, updated supplier specifications, altered lead times, and additional coordination or transport effort. Many of these costs can be avoided if downstream functions are aware of forthcoming changes early enough to respond.

In the absence of early impact analysis, organisations are frequently forced into reactive responses rather than planned adjustments.

 

Impact Analysis as a Cross-Organisational Capability

Impact analysis is, by its nature, cross-organisational.

Although PDM, PLM, and ERP systems all provide forms of change management functionality, each remains largely confined to its own domain. PDM systems focus on design data, PLM systems on development workflows, and ERP systems on production, inventory, and cost. None of these systems, on their own, offers a complete view of enterprise-wide impact.

As a result, impact analysis often falls between systems and between organisational boundaries.

To be effective, impact analysis must draw input from engineering, production, supply chain, quality, and service, and must be applied before, during, and after change execution.

Before development, impact analysis supports informed prioritisation based on propagation risk, resource availability, anticipated lead time, and expected financial return.

During development, it enables coordination and adjustment as new information emerges, reducing waiting time, replanning, and the need for emergency changes.

After development, comparing actual outcomes with expected impact helps close the learning loop and improve future decision-making.

Impact analysis is not a checklist. It is an organisational capability.

 

Conclusion: Impact Analysis as a Means of Enterprise Control

Enterprise changes cross functional boundaries, systems, and responsibilities. They cannot be effectively managed through isolated workflows or approvals alone.

Impact analysis should not be understood as documentation, CAD analysis, or a software feature. Rather, it provides decision support, underpins planning, supports risk management, and protects capital investment.

Organisations that understand the consequences of change early are better positioned to move quickly and predictably, not by working harder, but by avoiding unnecessary rework, delays, and surprises.

 

Impact Analysis in ECM-Go

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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. 

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With this certificate, Bjarke and Zeljko strengthes both their own expertise as well as the entire team’s mutual ability to utilize Windchill even better in our day-to-day: good for both the team and our projects. Well done!

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A special thank you goes to BDO and Spar Nord for this recognition, and to all our customers and partners who have made the journey possible. Your trust, collaboration, and support are the foundation that enables us to celebrate this achievement today.

For us, Succesvirksomhed 2025 is not just an award, but a reminder that attention to detail, persistence, and close collaboration make the real difference.

We look forward to continuing our journey, strengthening our partnerships, and creating even more value in the future

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A Quick Introduction to Enterprise Change Management

In recent years, a new perspective on ECM has emerged focusing on a broader and more holistic understanding of ECM. At BoostPLM, we are dedicated to this approach that is often embraced by the term Enterprise Change Management.

The shift from Engineering Change Management to Enterprise Change Management emphasizes the need to go beyond the engineering department when dealing with changes. We need to understand the full picture when we request, plan and execute changes.

Following this approach assumes some prerequisites. To achieve the “full picture”, organizations must be in control of relevant information and data, and furthermore, they must be able to accommodate collaboration between the various departments and stakeholders. It requires the ability to know the impact of a change across the entire value chain and to have an overview of how multiple changes interconnect and relate.

Engineering Change Management in D365FO

The module of Engineering Change Management in D365FO is designed to manage different kinds of changes; product versions, engineering approvals, BOM revisions.

The module is a strong tool for companies within the manufacturing domain to control their product structure, releases and revisions. It also provides workflows for handling Engineering Change Requests (ECRs) and Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) in a structured manner.

All this makes the tool highly useful for handling regulatory compliance and structured workflows for approval.

Although the ECM module in D365FO is well-functioning and a strong tool for its purpose, it however still falls short when it comes to an Enterprise Change Management approach to changes.

The module’s strong focus on operational data and product structures makes it a robust solution for the operation-focused part of changes. There is no reason to not reap the benefits of it’s well functioning opportunities to support handling of product data and revisions.

The Silo Problem

While being a strong tool, the limitation of the ECM module in D365 therefore lies in the aspects of your change process that reach outside of the product change itself. When both processes, data and resources involved in the change all fall within an operational context, you risk a siloed view and handling of changes.

The same silo effect is present in other systems with relevance for ECM like PLM or PDM systems. In these systems, we often have the same case of narrow focus on the change – and often in the engineering department.

If you wish to pursue a more holistic approach to ECM, this becomes a limitation and a risk of duplicate work, broken traceability, and manual coordination across departments and outside of the defined workflows.  Furthermore, performing thorough impact analyses becomes a major, manual task when it is performed in siloes where information is gathered to create an overview for each single change.

In other words, when pursuing an Enterprise Change Management approach, you need to connect the otherwise siloed sources of information; both people and systems. A part of this is connecting your D365FO ECM to other relevant systems.

End-to-End Engineering Change Management Process Across your Business

To embrace the full potential of D365FO’s ECM module, you need to make it a part of a bigger picture; an ECM end-to-end process that includes your entire business. This means that you can advantageously connect your D365FO to other systems and data sources by building an ECM-dedicated layer on top; a solution that connects with your existing solutions to create one, single system built for integration. One place to gather your entire ECM process when it comes to not only systems like PLM and ERP but also people, processes, departments and so on.

This will enable a holistic, data-driven change management system that spans across your business both when it comes to departments and systems. It allows for all stakeholders to collaborate on both the assessment and execution of a change, as well as it allows for visibility of the status and progress of changes.

At BoostPLM, we have solved this issue with a software solution that handles the integrations for you. It combines your PLM system with D365FO – and potentially other relevant enterprise systems – and supports you in handling your changes end-to-end while also letting you reap the benefits of the D365FO ECM module for the product focused part of your ECM process.

If you want to learn more about either Enterprise Change Management, ECM in D365FO or our own ECM-Go solution, do not hesitate to reach out.

We are always happy to join a non-binding conversation about ECM.

Explore our ECM-Go solution

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