Whether and when are not the same thing.
Ask three departments, get three answers:
馃搻 Engineering: it's a revision
馃彮 Manufacturing: it's a cut-in date
馃敡 Service: it's the change itself, the bulletin and every unit it touched
A revision isn't it either. Bump an assembly and you've bundled three unrelated changes. Service can't write one clean bulletin.
After the unit ships, "when" collapses into "whether." Is the change on this one: yes or no?
Martijn Dullaart makes the case for whether before when. I think it bites even harder in service than on the line.
Could you list every change on a unit delivered tomorrow, or are you trusting a date?
EBOM and MBOM? Most shops have one enterprise mashup.
The factory's structure got pushed onto engineering years ago. It's been that way so long people just call it "the EBOM."
What the mashup costs you:
鉃★笍 Engineering doing manufacturing's job too
鉃★笍 One change, fixed in every plant's copy
鉃★笍 Factory improvements wait on engineering
鉃★笍 A second plant means restructuring it all again
The fix isn't picking a winner. Keep an engineering structure that holds intent. Derive the build structure from it.
I've heard this called arrangements, level 5s, installations, model list items. What do you call it?
Then it checked the real process, saw the tooling couldn't reach one joint, and moved that fastener before anything was released.
It caught a collision that normally bites two steps downstream.
This came up on the "Designing With Intelligence" panel at Ai4.
If your designs keep colliding with reality after release, let's talk.
youtu.be/OyCaNu3I034?t=2317
So it stays invisible until the floor, where one person finds a wrench that won't fit.
Make the 3D the authoritative truth and the problem shows up on a screen, weeks early, while the fix is cheap.
We train engineers for years. We hand them the best CAD and simulation tools on the market.
Then we bury a quarter of their week in non-engineering work.
Not because they're slow. Because of how we make them manage data.
CoLab's research puts it at 23% of engineering time lost to non-value-added work. More than a day a week, every week.
That's not a discipline problem. It's an architecture problem.
I've watched teams claw back most of that day by killing the clone-and-own habit alone. Same team, more engineering, not more hours.
Let engineers engineer.
How much of your team's week disappears into non-engineering work?