Quality Machine

Engineering change orders (ECOs) are part of almost every development process, consuming a significant part of engineering capacity and contributing heavily to development and tool costs. Many companies use a support process to administer ECOs, which fundamentally determines ECO costs.

This administrative process encompasses the emergence of a change (e.g., a problem or a market-driven feature change), the management approval of the change, up to the change's final implementation.Despite the tremendous time pressure in development projects in general and in the ECO process in particular, this process can consume several weeks, several months, and in extreme cases even over 1 year.