Managing Material BOM Changes with a Change Number

SAP Change Numbers are important components of Engineering Change Management (ECM) that offer structured control and documentation for managing changes to master data and objects within SAP systems.

A Change Number is a unique identifier used to document, control, and track changes to SAP objects such as Materials, BOMs, Routings, and other master data. It serves as a central reference point for managing engineering changes in a controlled way.

Change Numbers enable you to:

• Document the reason for changes and store relevant supporting documents
• Group together changes affecting different SAP objects under one change identifier
• Maintain complete audit trails for product liability and compliance requirements

Performing a Material BOM change process with a change number, different roles are involved. The following video gives you an overview of the roles and their tasks.

As you just saw, the process steps for revising a material BOM with a change master include:

• Understand at any time who has made a change to a bill of materials and why.
• Create a new change number within the material BOM and use it directly.
• Compare old and new development levels of the material BOM.

A material BOM offers a complete, formally structured list of all components needed to manufacture a product, including descriptions, object numbers, quantities, and units of measure. BOMs can represent both single-level and multi-level product structures, allowing you to manage complex assemblies where components themselves have sub-components. This hierarchical structure enables better organization of complex manufacturing processes.

Change masters can now be used to define, revise, plan, and release different validities of BOM changes at header or component level.

With the where-used functionality, BOM engineers can find all occurrences of a specific component across all existing material BOMs. With a mass replace function, component substitutions can be easily managed.

Production Engineer Eric creates two different change numbers with different validities. Then he defines the necessary object types to make a Material BOM change possible.

Samar, the BOM Engineer, first does a material BOM creation together with an existing change number. This number is also used inside material BOM for component changes. Finally, he creates a new change number inside the Material BOM screen. At the end Samar checks the change numbers with the timeline functionality.

Material BOM changes are done and the change numbers aren't used anymore. Therefore, Eric sets the change numbers to inactive.

In a second scenario, Eric again creates a change number. Samar uses this one to do mass changes of material BOM components.

In this scenario, Samar uses a new change number, created by Eric, to hand over an engineering BOM to a manufacturing BOM.

Up to now, Samar, our BOM Engineer, has made BOM changes with existing material numbers. Some changes were done with a change number, some not. However, he's now reached the situation that he's to add a material, requested by the manufacturing department, where a material number doesn't yet exist in database tables. Samar decides to use a preliminary component.

BOM Engineer Samar has previously worked with the "Maintain Bill of Material" app. In doing so, he could edit the individual BOM or open the assemblies to edit them. In this case, BOMs are processed on a single-level basis. However, Samar now wants to display the BOM on several levels and process it if necessary. He wants to group components that don't have an assembly indicator.

Up to now, Samar has changed components by calling the proper "Maintain Bill of Material" app. He now sees that there's also a suitable app for mass changes available.

Up to now, the BOM Engineer Samar has always made changes to the BOM header individually in the respective BOM. Now, he is interested in mass changes.

Up to now, Samar has added components by calling the proper Maintain Bill of Material app. He now sees that there's also a good app for mass addition in the Fiori launchpad.

Now, you should have an understanding of "How to manage a material BOM with a change number".

After completing this lesson, you're able to:

• name the benefits of using a Change Number
• define a Change Number inside a SAP system
• perform material BOM changes with a Change Number
• perform a mass replacement of BOM components using a Change Number
• maintain a multilevel BOM with a Change Number
• perform mass changes of BOM components and header information with a change number