Somewhere in your company, there is one engineer who knows why that seal dimension is what it is. Your interchangeability decisions are only as good as her memory. She retires in three years.
We treat interchangeability assessment as a process question: who reviews the change, who signs off, which board approves. I have come to believe there is a question underneath it that almost nobody asks. Not who signs off on the claim, but who still can.
A real assessment of Form, Fit, Function, and Interface presumes someone can see all of a part’s applications and the reasons behind its requirements. In most organizations, that knowledge is not in the PLM system. It lives in the heads of a handful of veterans. And they are leaving: nearly a quarter of the US manufacturing workforce was 55 or older back in 2017, and manufacturing is projected to lose around 1.84 million workers to retirement.
Here is the uncomfortable mechanism. When that context walks out the door unrecorded, dispositions do not become more cautious. They become more confident. Form, same. Fit, same. Function, same. Three checkboxes, ticked faster than ever, because nobody is left who remembers what could go wrong.
The answer is not heroic documentation after the fact. Nobody writes down twenty years of context in their last month. Oleg Shilovitsky calls the missing asset “product memory”: the recorded decision context that lets tomorrow’s engineer understand why yesterday’s change was safe. I like the term because it names what actually walks out the door. Your product memory should not retire when your engineers do. The way to build it is a change process that captures the why at decision time. This is what I value most in CM2’s closed-loop change process: the impact analysis is recorded when the decision is made, by the people who can still see the impacts. Product memory by design instead of by archaeology.
So let me ask: how much of your interchangeability knowledge is in your systems, and how much walks out at the next retirement party? I am genuinely curious how you capture the why, not just the what. Let me know what you think.