Configuration Management for Senior Managers: Essential Product Configuration and Lifecycle Management for Manufacturing

Configuration Management for Senior Managers is written to help managers in product manufacturing and engineering environments identify the ways in which they can streamline their products and processes through proactive documentation control and product lifecycle management.

Experienced consultant Frank Watts gives a practitioner’s view tailored to the needs of management, without the textbook theory that can be hard to translate into real-world change. Unlike competing books that focus on CM within software and IT environments, this engineering-focused resource is packed with examples and lessons learned from leading product development and manufacturing companies, making it easy to apply the approach to your business.

• Developed to help you identify key policies and practices needing attention in your organization to establish and maintain consistency of processes and products, and to reduce operational costs
• Focused on configuration management (CM) within manufacturing and engineering settings, with relevant examples from leading companies
• Written by an experienced consultant and practitioner with the knowledge to provide real-world insights and solutions, not just textbook theory

Frank Watts has over forty-eight years of industrial and consultation experience as a design engineer, industrial engineer, manufacturing engineer, systems analyst, project manager, and in management. He founded his own specialist configuration management company to provide specific expertise in product release, change control, bills of material and other engineering documentation control issues.

Formally a director of engineering services, a director of operations and a director of manufacturing engineering, Watts has worked for Caterpillar, Collins Radio, Control Data, Storage Technology, UFE and Archive. He has guided the development of engineering change control processes at numerous companies and made significant contributions towards improving new product release processes, installing MRP/ERP systems and new numbering systems, as well as helping companies attain a single BOM database and guided reengineering of CM processes. He is an NDIA Certified Configuration and Data Manager, author of several magazine articles and author of the Engineering Documentation Control Handbook and CM Metrics.