A framework for engineering change management in enterprise resource planning using service-oriented architecture

Collaborative product development addresses ever-increasing competition in the marketplace by combining capabilities of several independent organisations to form a virtual resource-rich organisation. An engineering change (EC) in such a collaborative environment inevitably involves multiple organisations. Therefore, managing it effectively requires all these organisations to plan and implement the change together. The engineering change management (ECM) system should ensure proper interactions between different information systems, provide departments and partners with consistent data access, and maintain flexible workflows to meet product or partner specific requirements. A service-oriented architecture (SOA) based framework is proposed to carryout ECM across a supply chain. Each service in the SOA framework accomplishes an independent task, then performs a set of tasks constituting a business process. This framework enables the interaction between the partner's information systems in a communication backbone to achieve an effective ECM over a collaborative network of product development.