Introduction

This document describes the UK_Defence Business Data Exchange Specification for defining Change Effectivity information. This information is used for identifying the effect of changes to a configuration item on those products (actual / realized) that depend on that configuration item. The information is generated in and used by the Configuration Management process.

The overall scope of this UK_Defence Business Data Exchange Specification is taken from the UK_Defence Business Process Model information flow named "Effectivity", and whose class is defined to be:

Change effectivity includes both production break-in and retrofit. When changes are introduced which relate to items that are already in production or in service, it may not always be necessary, desirable or cost-effective to upgrade all instances of the product to the new configuration. This interrelated sub-process determines which items of the product are to be changed, including production, retrofit, development and prototypes and pre-production items. Effectivity determination requires the balancing of a number of considerations, such as: ·the urgency of the change - e.g., is safety involved?; ·the likely schedule for implementation, and the availability of associated resources and materials; ·the items and materials on hand (can implementation be delayed until they are depleted, can they be modified, or do they need to be scrapped?); ·the need to support multiple configurations because all existing items of the product may not be updated at the same time, or at all; ·timing of the introduction of the changed product with respect to customer preferences and needs, competition, marketing strategies etc. Effectivity is expressed in different ways depending on product type and quantity or rate of production. Two common means of expressing effectivity are by product item identifying number (e.g. serial number) and by date of manufacture. Other examples of effectivity expression are by version number and by product group identifying number (e.g. lot numbers, batch number). All are intended to express as clearly and precisely as practical which item(s) of the products are and which are not to be changed.