Product changes happen every day in manufacturing. And almost every one of them starts the same way: with an engineering change request — the process by which a change gets proposed, reviewed, assessed, coordinated, decided, and documented. A customer complaint. A new material spec. A regulatory update that wasn't even on your radar last week. None of this is the exception. This is business as usual.
The real problem is rarely the change itself. It's the path it takes through the organization.
Look at production costs and you'll see the obvious things: material prices, labor, machine runtime. What's harder to quantify and what often goes unnoticed for years — is the cost of a change request that moves through the organization too slowly, too poorly coordinated, or too incomplete.
We've seen the pattern play out across countless projects. A request starts life as an email. Engineering, procurement, quality assurance, and production each weigh in — in separate systems, separate spreadsheets, or just a reply-all thread. Somewhere along the way, information falls through the cracks. Assessments stall. Impacts on the bill of materials or delivery dates surface too late. By the time a decision finally gets made, the process has eaten up weeks and nobody can quite say where they went.
What makes this worse: an engineering change rarely stays in one lane. It ripples through production, quality, procurement, logistics, and sales. Each department evaluates it from its own vantage point, on its own timeline. When those assessments never come together in a coordinated way, whoever owns the final decision ends up making it with incomplete information. The consequences only become visible once they're unavoidable: unplanned follow-on costs, slipped delivery dates, quality issues that could have been caught.
This isn't a failure of individuals. It's a structural problem. Most companies hold production itself to high standards, with clear, well-defined processes. The process that changes that core process rarely gets the same treatment. Change management is often the last analog piece left in an otherwise increasingly digitized production environment.
Business cases from across the manufacturing industry show a typical ROI of six to twelve months for a digitally managed change request process. That's where you start to see, clearly, where value was quietly leaking out before.
In our work with manufacturing companies, from mid-sized Swiss production operations to international industrial players, one pattern shows up again and again: everyone has a change process. The question that actually matters is whether that process is genuinely end-to-end, or whether it still leans on email, Excel, or someone walking down the hall to ask, somewhere along the way.
A change request that starts out incomplete usually stays that way. Capture the root cause, affected products, materials, timelines, and an initial cost estimate in a structured way from the outset, and it changes the quality of every assessment that follows. None of this is complicated. It just has to be mandatory.
The other big lever is having departments assess a change in parallel instead of one after another in practice, that alone can cut time-to-decision in half. A clear deadline (eight working days is a figure that's proven itself in practice) doesn't feel like pressure here; it feels like protection. And when every stakeholder can see how everyone else is assessing the change, it fundamentally changes the quality of the conversation. Alignment meetings get shorter. Misunderstandings surface earlier.
The last piece, and the one most often underestimated in digitalization discussions, is documentation. Who decided what, and on what basis? Every company has to answer that question eventually — to customers, to regulators, to their own board. A complete digital record isn't bureaucracy. It's risk protection.
What matters isn't just capturing a change request digitally. What matters is managing every request as a case: with status, ownership, deadlines, assessments, documents, cost implications, risks, and a full decision history. That's exactly what separates a digital form from a genuinely managed change request process.
And these mechanisms, complete upfront capture, parallel instead of sequential review, fixed deadlines, mutual visibility, and airtight documentation, are all things technology can map directly.
Before deciding whether and how to digitalize your change request process, it's worth taking an honest look at where you actually stand.
How long does it take, on average, to reach a decision on a change request today and how much of that is pure waiting time? How often do cost or delivery impacts only surface after the decision has already been made? And could you, right now, tell within five minutes which change requests are currently open, where they stand, and who owns them?
If you can't answer these questions immediately and with confidence, that's your answer right there.
Axon Ivy maps this entire process as a single, continuous workflow, from digital intake through cross-departmental assessment to a documented decision. Parallel process steps. Automatic task assignment. One central digital case file. These are the mechanisms that turn a chaotic coordination effort into a process you can actually manage. FROX handles the implementation and makes sure the solution doesn't just work technically, it actually takes root in how the organization works day to day.
What technology doesn't replace is clarity about ownership. Digitalization makes visible what was previously hidden, including the cases where roles are fuzzy or decision-making authority was never actually defined. In our experience, the technical implementation is often the smaller part of the job. The harder question is: who decides what, under which conditions, with what consequences? A well-structured process can answer that question. But someone has to ask it first.
Engineering changes aren't going to slow down. Markets move faster, customer requirements keep climbing, and regulatory demands keep piling up. Manufacturing companies that treat their change request process as an operational blind spot pay for it, even if it never shows up as a line item on an invoice.
Companies that build a genuinely end-to-end, digitally managed process gain something that turns out to matter enormously in practice: the ability to make faster, better-informed decisions than their competitors. This isn't a digitalization project. This is competitiveness.
Our team at Axon Ivy runs these kinds of assessments regularly with CFO offices across DACH and the wider EMEA region. A conversation like that ends one of two ways: either concrete starting points for a pilot process, or the realization that your first mile is already running better than industry benchmarks would suggest. Either outcome is a valuable one.
This article was co-written by Alexandra Witzke-Ng (Axon Ivy) and Dr Hanspeter Seiler (FROX AG).
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Dr. Hanspeter Seiler is Head of Digitalization at FROX AG, where he helps manufacturing companies digitalize complex business processes. FROX AG has been an Axon Ivy implementation partner for many years. |