What is Product Change Management and Why Should You Care?

Product Change Management is a structured approach to handling modifications in product design, engineering documentation, or manufacturing processes. It ensures that changes are implemented efficiently, which helps to reduce risks, maintain compliance, and improve overall product quality. Any product revision follows a defined process to justify the modification, track its implementation, and document its impact.

Organizations do not modify a product without a valid reason. Changes typically stem from product improvements, field feedback, customer requirements, or issues discovered during prototyping. Without a proper system, teams risk losing traceability while making costly errors that create corresponding issues downstream.

Key Steps in the Product Change Management Process

Change is inevitable in the product development process. But in product design and manufacturing, effective change management is the difference between seamless innovation and expensive setbacks. Without a well-structured change management process, organizations are likely to miscommunicate and waste time and money. Follow these key steps in a high-functioning change management process.

1) Capture the Need for Change

User interface for Change Management showing capturing the need

Change begins with an issue. Whether a customer complaint, field failure, or internal design improvement, every organization must systematically capture and document the need for change.

Without a centralized system, issues get lost among email chains, spreadsheets, and disconnected teams, which leads to overlooked issues and delayed fixes. However, with a structured change process, anyone from a field technician to a design engineer can raise an issue, ensuring that no critical problem goes unnoticed.

2) Evaluate Change Impact

SOLIDWORKS Change Management dashboard showing impact evaluation

Changes vary in impact. Some are resolved with minor tweaks; others send ripples across manufacturing, supply chains, and regulatory compliance. Conducting a thorough impact analysis before a change is implemented is key, including questions such as:

What are the costs?
How will manufacturing be affected?
Are regulatory approvals required?
Will the change introduce new risks?

A robust change management system provides real-time visibility into all affected parts, processes, and teams, which eliminates guesswork and costly mistakes.

3) Gain Approval from the Right Stakeholders

SOLIDWORKS Change Management dashboard showing approval process

Change should never be made in isolation. A manual process often requires multiple meetings, emails, and folder-based workflows that invite errors and slow the approval process.

A centralized digital change management system automates approvals, provides traceability, and eliminates bottlenecks while ensuring no steps are missed and decisions regarding changes are made efficiently and quickly.

4) Implement a Change with Full Traceability

SOLIDWORKS Change Management dashboard showing traceability

Once a change is approved, teams move into action:

Engineering updates CAD models.
Manufacturing updates production processes.
Procurement sources updated materials.
Quality teams validate compliance.

In a disconnected system, changes get lost in the shuffle, potentially leading to incorrect parts, production delays, and financial losses. By unifying everything regarding a change in a single platform, companies ensure that every team is working from the latest approved version, which reduces errors and rework.

5) Close the Loop with Comprehensive Change Documentation

SOLIDWORKS Change Management dashboard showing change documentation

Every change must be fully documented, not only for internal accountability but for regulatory compliance and future reference. Without proper traceability, companies risk costly recalls, compliance failures, and inability to justify past decisions. Current and future stakeholders benefit greatly from knowing:

Why the change was made
Who approved it
What parts were impacted
How the final result was successful

With a digital change management system, all records are automatically stored and linked, eliminating the need for manually tracking and ensuring an audit-ready history of every decision.

Facing the Challenges in Product Development Change Management

Change in product development isn’t just a necessity – it’s an inevitability. Whether a design improvement, field failure correction, or regulatory update, every change affects engineering, manufacturing, procurement, compliance, and beyond.

Yet, despite its critical role, change management can be one of the most frustrating, time consuming, and costly processes for companies, often because reliance on outdated, manual, or siloed approaches introduces unnecessary complexity, inefficiency, and risk. Here are just 4 challenges.

Lack of a Centralized System for Managing Changes – Most companies have a change management process, but many lack a system for effective management. Without a centralized digital solution, changes are often tracked in paper-based approvals that get lost or misfiled; email chains without clear accountability; Excel spreadsheets that lack real-time visibility; and disparate systems (PLM, PDM, ERP, Jira, etc.) that don’t talk to each other. The result is miscommunication, duplicated efforts, and costly errors.
Unnecessary Time and Effort Spent on Change Tasks – Engineers don’t start their day thinking, “I’d love to fill out paperwork today.” But in many organizations, that’s exactly what change management feels like. Countless emails along with meetings to get the entire team in alignment. Creating screenshots to document proposed changes with screenshots is clunky and slow. Manual tracking approvals require herculean effort. Worst of all, these administrative burdens rob engineers of time to generate revenue by building innovative products faster and more efficiently.
Poor Visibility into the Full Impact of Change – No change happens in a vacuum. A single design tweak might necessitate new supplier qualifications. A change in product materials may affect manufacturing processes. Part replacement could require regulatory re-certification. Without a structured impact analysis, teams make uninformed decisions that lead to supply chain disruptions, production delays, or expensive recalls.
Inefficient Communication Across Departments – Change management impacts far more than engineering. Without a centralized digital system, departments operate separately, leading to manufacturing being uninformed of a design update, procurement ordering outdated parts, or field teams woefully unaware of critical product modifications. Without clear communication, change becomes a costly mess resulting in wasted materials, rework, and missed market deadlines.

User interface screen for Change Management showing a change action

Companies that think they can get by with traditional manual change management methods are sitting on a ticking time bomb. A missing document can lead to a regulatory compliance failure. An overlooked approval can result in manufacturing the wrong product. Worse, a lost historical record can force teams to needlessly repeat costly mistakes.

However, automated change processes free up engineering time, eliminate bottlenecks, and speed approvals without sacrificing control. A robust change management platform ensures every stakeholder understands the cost, effort, and risk of each change before it happens. A single digital system ensures real-time visibility across engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain teams so everyone stays on the same page.

Tools and Software for Change Management

Managing product changes involves more than just tracking revisions – it requires orchestrating an efficient, traceable, and collaborative process that keeps teams aligned and products moving forward.

One essential tool for streamlining change management is a centralized digital platform. A unified environment like the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform ensures that all stakeholders, from engineering to manufacturing to procurement, work from a single source of truth. A dedicated change management platform also consolidates all change requests, approvals, and documentation which increases visibility while reducing errors and improving compliance.

Change impact analysis tools also help make smarter decisions for the simple reason that not every change should be implemented immediately – some are minor, while others have significant cost and operational impacts. Change impact analysis tools provide a structured approach to evaluating the cost of implementing a change, the time required for design and production updates, and how a change will affect procurement, compliance, and downstream processes. Teams can assess the full impact of a change before committing, eliminating guesswork and preventing costly missteps.

Change Management dashboard - SOLIDWORKS

For example, automated workflows streamline approvals and signoffs, ensuring that the right stakeholders are notified immediately, and approvals move forward without unnecessary delays. In traditional change management, getting approvals is a time-consuming, manual process involving endless meetings and emails. An automated environment ensures that change orders don’t get lost in email chains or among piles of manual paperwork.

Full traceability and compliance documentation are mandatory in medical device, aerospace, automotive, and other industries. Preventing unauthorized changes could lead to compliance failures. However, change management software provides a structured system that ensures complete traceability by tracking every change request, approval, and revision, and maintains a searchable digital record for audits and regulatory reviews. When teams always know what changed, why it changed, and who approved it, companies ensure compliance and reduce risk.
Real-time collaboration across departments that systems like the 3DEXPERIENCE platform provide ensure that all stakeholders have real-time visibility into product changes, eliminating miscommunication and ensuring smooth execution.

Benefits of Effective Change Management in Design

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides a cloud-based product development environment with tools for efficiently managing product change. CAD-savvy and non-savvy users alike can participate in the change management process from any location with an internet connection, from smartphones, iPads, laptops, and more, plus there is no software to install.

Organizations that implement structured change management solutions found on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform typically experience:

Reduced Errors and Rework – Prevents outdated designs from reaching production, saving time and resources.
Improved Compliance and Documentation – Ensures adherence to industry regulations and quality standards.
Faster Time-to-Market – Speeds up approvals and implementation of necessary product improvements.
Better Collaboration and Communication – Tracks and coordinates changes in real time made by teams across departments.
Cost Savings – Avoids expensive mistakes by analyzing the financial impact of changes before implementation.

SOLIDWORKS Change Management user interface showing change execution

When it is easy to communicate concerns, identify issues, and propose resolutions, all team members, from engineers to managers to executives, can participate in the change management process. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s change management tools enable faster, more efficient decision-making throughout the change management process because everyone has instant access to updates made by the entire team.

What is Product Change Management?