Developing coherency matrix to support design changes of complex product

In many business fields, customers have become very demanding to the point that they only ask for individualized products and services. These changes at the customer´s level have forced companies to react by developing new operations strategies in order to secure market shares and improve profits. New products (customized product) are often designed change or modification to existing product. Design by modification applies particularly to safety critical product where the reuse of existing working parts and subsystems can reduce cost and risk. However change is rarely a matter of just reusing or modifying parts. Changing one part can propagate through the entire design leading to costly rework of the whole product. This paper introduces tools to aid designers in understanding the potential effects of change based on studies of industrial complex product. The coherency matrix has been developed to model the integration and visualization of change propagation through system connectivity.