Configuration Management (CM) is both a management discipline and a process. The purpose of both is really quite simple. CM is designed to ensure that organizations have the information they need to make sure their products perform as intended. CM is particularly important today. Today, the customer wants more. They want product quality to go up and price to go down, they expect fast delivery, and they want products and services tailored to increasingly exacting expectations. CM is a pivotal weapon in this new competitive battleground. It's the only fully developed management discipline that directly focuses on managing a product's viability. The major benefit of configuration management is the tangible value it adds to all stages of the product life cycle. At every stage, the process is modeled, appropriate closed-loop controls are implemented, and the interface to the next stage is clearly defined. The recipients at each successive stage are treated like customers (they have requirements and are expecting the deliverables to meet those requirements). The lack of redundancy and human intervention, and improvement in data accuracy, alone can constitute a 10-20% savings in labor and overhead. This return in people power can be re-invested in performance enhancements and new opportunities. With configuration management, design and development meet the objectives of the customer the first time. Data and changes are recorded so that the product can be repeated exactly with minimal human intervention. New innovations are more timely and cost-effective because data is accurate and can be readily re-used. Engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and post-sale support are synchronized because the exchange of data follows a predictable, consistent, and controlled process when using CM. There are dynamic interchanges where information needs to be shared and updated, and CM verifies that this information handoff is accurate and complete. CM provides a means of continually tracking and reporting the life cycle status. Action items, workflow, customer communications, and impact assessment are based on accurate information provided by CM. And when there are unforeseen problems, CM provides the trail, backward and forward, that enables improvements to be implemented rapidly.