Quick advances in technology, challenges related to globalization such as increased economic warfare among developed countries, outsourcing and offshoring, and a global over qualified and multilingual workforce are increasing the competitiveness of businesses. In order to succeed in the rapidly evolving global manufacturing landscape, companies will need to embrace a targeted approach to some of the key elements of manufacturing competitiveness, including Configuration Management. Configuration

more »

... Management has still a long way to evolve. This study reviews the current situation of the process of Configuration Management (CM) in such a competitive world. It focuses on one of the most important disciplines within CM, which is the Configuration Identification and more concretely the selection of CIs. The contribution of this research is to explain: first, why CM has become more, rather than less, important in complex engineering in an era of globalization; and second, a review of the process to select the Configuration Items (CIs) which are key to manage the configuration of high tech engineering products. The investigation concludes by identifying the necessity of a scientific process for the CIs selection.