Any product and manufacturing project contains many issues. The issues are coming as a team is progressing with the design, production planning, procurement, and many other related tasks. To have a strategy and plan for how to cover them is an important element of product development processes.
What is Issues management?
The issue management process is a way to identify, address, and resolve many issues across teams and tasks. Issue management software can help to process the following important tasks:
1- Record issues.
To create a record for all issues is important. Without that, everything can be forgotten and missed. Records allow creating traceability and improve the transparency in the organization and across multiple departments and teams.
2- Identify the impact and priority
Not all issues are the same. The most important thing is to identify how each issue can impact the processor-specific units. To have information semantically connected is important. The most powerful tools in product development are “where used” or “impact tools helping to identify what elements of products are related to a specific item or assembly. It helps to improve traceability or issues.
3- Create a plan to address the issues, report and visualize the status
The complexity of product development, production planning, and manufacturing is increasing. Having visibility in this process is important to ensure the delivery and resolution on time.
Issue Management And Risk Management: Is there a difference
The issue and risk management are connected. Any unplanned even during the design, production planning, procurement, and manufacturing process can introduce risks to the project delivery time, quality, and the overall success of the project completion.
Therefore, any issue management system is connected to risk management functions that should be able to get access to issue management and get all issues in the order of priority and the way issues can impact on the project delivery.
Main Objectives for Issue Management
Speed is a critical factor for the engineering and manufacturing teams. Increasing the speed of development, planning, and purchasing cycles is a critical factor to deliver the product on time and within budget. Effective procedures involving issue management allow to ensure, no open issues remain on each stage of product design, engineering, and purchasing. OpenBOM provides unique features and functions to help you to track all product issues, collaborate within the team, and connect issues to specific elements of product information such as parts, items, documents, bill of materials, purchase orders.
Another important element of issue management is to connect your team with the issues and control the follow-up process. It is extremely important to create visibility and transparency of information including issues in the team. OpenBOM real-time collaboration and data sharing allowing to provide instant information sharing, comments, and analysis of how issues can impact product readiness, development step, history of changes, and many others.
A super important thing is to manage information in the context. It is not surprising to see how project managers are trying to keep and cross-link Excels with issues and Bill of Materials with product information. These types of processes are naturally happening when Excel is a tool for everything. Structured data management and escaping from Excels are a vital part of a good Issue management process.
Steps in the implementation of the issue management process
OpenBOM gives you two possible solutions to track and process issues – (1) capture issues related to item and BOM records, order BOMs, and purchase orders; (2) to connect and link OpenBOM data records to issues managed by other systems.
1- Adding notes and issue information to OpenBOM.
OpenBOM flexible data model allows each participant to add properties to your bill of materials, item records, and purchase orders. By adding more information to these records, you can preserve information about issues associated with the specific product elements. You can also add people and related information to these records. Check OpenBOM properties for more information.
2- Connect issues managed by external systems and OpenBOM.
OpenBOM tools allow reference property allows adding links to external applications and data sources. It allows you to connect links to issues defined in other issue management and project management applications. Check more Reference Properties in OpenBOM.
The benefits of using OpenBOM
Adding issues to Bill of Materials and Item records combined with real-time collaboration allows us to keep issues connected to product information, which leads to the following benefits:
1- Improve transparency in project execution
Speed is the main factor in modern engineering and product development. Transparency is the way to streamline the data handover and project management. To have data visible solves many problems earlier in the process.
2- Follow up on the problem related to engineering, planning, and procurement activity
Actionable information is a way to handle a follow-up process with multiple stakeholders, teams, and specific engineers. To allow engineer to see information contextually in the Bill of Materials or to provide the right view of the information can save tons of time to follow up on issues.
3- Eliminating problems late in the project, procurement, and manufacturing process.
Coming later to the issues is one of the main problems to introduce risks in product delivery. Having a system allowing to raise issues fast and demand resolutions is an ultimate solution to eliminate the problem earlier and to eliminate a potential cost and time increase.
Conclusion
An effective issue management solution integrating product information such as the Bill of Materials, Item records, Orders, and Vendors allows increasing the visibility of the issues, presenting issues in a contextual form, and to track resolution of issues and delivery of the product. The result – engineering and manufacturing processes with a timely outcome and predictable cost.
OpenBOM SaaS PLM solutions provide flexible and scalable solutions to support both product information and connected issues together, sharing information between teams and organizations in the most flexible and fast manner. Check out how OpenBOM can help you by registering – REGISTER FREE HERE.