Remember the old Change Control Boards (CCBs)? These teams in manufacturing reviewed and approved changes to product designs, processes, or documents. They brought together people from engineering, manufacturing, quality, and other areas to ensure changes were well-planned and didn’t harm production or quality.
While traditional CCBs played a key role, their manual, time-consuming processes often caused delays. Many companies adopted product lifecycle management (PLM) software with virtual “Workflows” to mimic CCB operations. But even these systems face challenges: they’re often engineering-focused, making it difficult to get product data from a PLM system and other product data management tools and assess impacts across other departments or customers. The broad access to business processes, document management, quality management, business systems, service lifecycle management, supply chain management, and get up to date information is crtical.
This growing complexity is a common frustration among manufacturers. Old PLM solutions are not capable to provide this level of support and modern PLM software is needed.
Introducing OpenAI’s Operator
Launching in January 2025, OpenAI’s Operator represents a big step forward. This AI agent can access and work with applications on your computer, gathering and analyzing information quickly and accurately. It simplifies collaboration and automates tasks with minimal human intervention. Check out the video here: Operator Demo.
Operator’s ability to streamline workflows could make CCB processes faster, smarter, and more efficient. But it’s no magic wand—success depends on connecting AI to the right applications and workflows.
AI-Powered CCB Agent: A New Way to Manage Change
Back to my articles from the last month, I was talking about collaborative workspace and how it can help to everyone to consolidate information and perform impact analysis. Here are a few links to my articles. You can start here – Collaborative Workspace and AI Agents.
Let’s think about new product development process that can be empowered by AI agent models. An AI-powered CCB agent (inspired by Open AI Operator), could automate key tasks in change management:
- Automatically collect and organize change request data.
- Perform initial impact assessments with high accuracy.
- Route requests to the right stakeholders.
- Track and manage approvals.
- Provide real-time analytics on the change process.
Moving from Applications to Data and Small Language Models
The idea of introducing AI agents that can operate with multiple applications one more time demonstrate the diminishing roles of applications and increased value of data. This is a moment to start thinking what data models will support the operation of the data and how AI agents will get this data from multiple sources.
This is why graph data models and product knowledge graph will become extremely imporant in the future to allow to AI agents to get data in a meaningful way.
What is my conclusion?
I think 2025 will be dream come true moment for many places to rethink how we work with the data (instead of clunky old PLM and other enterprise applications). The AI CCB agent (just an idea) isn’t about replacing humans but supporting them. But by combing data using small language model it might open the door for better organizational performance, especially in the field that such a complex like Engineering change management.
Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM, a digital-thread platform providing cloud-native PDM, PLM, and ERP capabilities. With extensive experience in federated CAD-PDM and PLM architecture, I’m advocates for agile, open product models and cloud technologies in manufacturing. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
