5. Conclusion
The quality of an ECR is the end result of a process that covers several steps. The quality may be good from the very beginning or it may improve in the very last step. Exactly when the quality improves is difficult to know afterwards. If certain level of quality is never reached, the ECR will be rejected. Rejections, however, are relatively rare whereas spending large amounts of time to improve the quality is common. This indicates that the requests in the case company are usually relevant and get implemented.
Once the quality is good, the processing time of an ECR still depends on other factors, such as the criticality of the ECR, importance of the related product, engineering resources available. Nevertheless, it is clear that good quality requests enable fast changes while poor quality requests may cause more than a day of extra delay per request.
It is clear that the case company would benefit from better ECM training as the number of garbage in the system could be reduced significantly while the amount of hours spent on refining the ECRs could be reduced The number of rejections would also decrease slightly. However, the data used for this research do not clearly show how often and how much time is spent on improving the ECRs after the initial request phase.
