Tracking Engineering Change Impact Across the Product Lifecycle

A hardware product company approached us after facing challenges in understanding the downstream impact of engineering changes across their products.

Their engineering team was managing BOM revisions, engineering changes, test documents, and product information across spreadsheets, folders, and different internal systems.

When a component, PCB revision, or hardware specification changed, the team could document the change, but answering a more important question was difficult:

What else does this change affect?

The team had limited visibility into:

• Which products and product variants were using the affected component
• Which BOM revisions needed to be updated
• Which production builds were based on the previous revision
• Whether the change required additional validation or testing
• Which firmware version was compatible with the updated hardware
• Which manufacturing and test documents needed to be updated
• Which devices already shipped could be affected by the change

As a result, engineering teams spent significant time manually checking spreadsheets, folders, emails, and production records to understand the impact of each change.

A change that looked small within engineering could create additional work across manufacturing, testing, firmware, and field operations.

We helped the team bring their product engineering information into S3Suite and connect engineering changes with the product structure.

The team could:

• Create and track engineering changes in a structured workflow
• Connect changes to affected BOMs, components, and product revisions
• Identify which products and variants were using the affected component
• Link engineering changes with validation and test records
• Track the relationship between hardware revisions and firmware releases
• Maintain revision history for BOMs and engineering data
• Identify manufacturing builds associated with specific product revisions
• Connect released product information with device and field records
• Maintain a complete history of what changed, why it changed, and when it was released

Instead of manually searching across multiple sources after every engineering change, the team could see the affected product information in one connected system.