From my 35 years of experience working for Aerospace & Defense contractors I have witnessed that some experienced engineers and program managers truly understand, and thus appreciate, the importance of Configuration Management and Data Management (CMDM) in their organizations. Yet, others still do not respect the CMDM function for a myriad of reasons I have encountered over the years. Some of these concerns are quite reasonable, while others not so much.

After our last post on the Challenges of Implementing Configuration Management, a reader asked if the impediments to deploying configuration management were very different between a modest-size single-production facility versus a large multi-national multi-site enterprise. Our answer was both “No” and “Yes.”

Throughout CMstat’s history we have witnessed firsthand numerous obstacles that high-tech industries, like aerospace and defense, have experienced when implementing a Configuration Management (CM) strategy with supporting software tools. As with many new or rapidly-evolving technologies, most barriers in the successful deployment and adoption of CM are not overly technical in nature. Instead, they tend to be educational, organizational, procedural or contextual at their core.

What is the most frequent obstacle encountered by an organization developing, implementing, or repairing their Configuration Management strategy and execution? It is the misunderstanding among product managers, program managers, and business-line executives who think that change control management is configuration management. It is not!

Much has been recently written about the use of Configuration Management (CM) as products, equipment, systems, and infrastructures (both physical and digital) become more complex to design and maintain with frequent configuration changes over longer lifecycles of consumer use or asset deployment. As a result, the role of configuration management continues to rapidly expand and evolve, creating new challenges, opportunities and decisions for CM professionals, industry practitioners and solution providers.

In CMstat’s recent whitepaper on “Nimble Configuration Management for the Contract Supply & Service Chain” we shared the top CM requirements for hardware configuration management heard most often over our twenty-plus years of supporting customers in the A&D industry. They are: Intuitive and easily mastered in everyday use by the...

CMstat has published a new whitepaper on Nimble Hardware Configuration Management for the A&D Contract Supply and Service Chain. This paper examines how the needs of hardware configuration management professionals working in the supply and aftermarket service chains of industries like A&D are different from those CM needs of product...

Configuration Management (CM) is an important function that has often been used to justify investment in PLM by industry. Ironically, however, CM was often not deployed until near the end of many enterprise-wide implementations that often consumed years of planning, budget, and…