Introducing Product Change Management with Change Records - Process Industries

SAP S/4HANA for product change management with change records flexibly orchestrates the management of enterprise product changes. It can handle several types of objects that are affected by the intended changes, such as materials, BOMs, master recipes, and documents.

The change record keeps all information in one place. The progress of the change is controlled by a dedicated status management, and the change process is supported by workflow capabilities of process route. Collaboration using comments during the change process allows effective communication with all involved parties.

• Handle various object types with and without change numbers and model workflows flexibly
• Gain transparency with visual workflow capability combined with a status driven change control
• Improve efficiency with all change information in one easy-to-navigate place
• Get a single source of truth of all the data involved in a change
• Drive the change process efficiently through best practices and workflow templates
• Allow ad-hoc communication with stakeholders
• Leverage insights from engineering cockpit

With change records, you can do the following:

• Generate a change master for your change record.
• After the change is approved, you can allocate a change master to the change record. For more information, see Manage Change Masters.
• Add a detailed description for the change as a free text.
• Add objects to the change record, see the section below: Activities with Objects.
• Add custom attributes on header level and on change object level (e.g. material, document, BOM). Initiate and go through the workflow process. Change records use predefined workflow templates, see Workflows in Change Management.
• Add direct participants or roles to workflow steps.Approve changes using workflow approvals.
• Use classification by assigning a class to a change record.Export Excel-based ad-hoc reports.
• Add attachments to change records and change items by drag-and-drop from either your desktop or from Documents.
• Visualize the progress and get an instant overview of the change process using the record statuses.
• Track changes to a change record using integrated visual log for status transitions.
• Integrate the fragmented change requests by merging multiple change records into a new or an existing record.
• Split the change items of a change record into multiple iterative change records with one at a time to enable an easy re-modeling.
• Organize change records into a parent-child change record hierarchy to efficiently model the logical units of the change request.
• Add comments to a change record header or change item level for a quick information exchange.
• Markup proposed changes to BOM’s using Redlining feature and apply them easily via updating the existing version or generating a new BOM version for Version BOM, or overwriting the components via the redline for Classic BOM.

You can perform the following activities with objects:

• Add objects
• Modify objects
• Remove objects
• Attach files or links to the objects

Besides general actions, you can perform the following activities specific to the type of object:

• Material or Material BOM: You can click the Where Used button to navigate to the Material Where-Used List in BOMs app and find out where the selected material or BOM is used.
• Material, Material BOM, or BOM Item: You can attach files or links to the object.
• Document: You can create a new document directly in the change record.
• Material, Bill of Material, and Master Recipe: You can switch on processing status per item for these objects to indicate work progress. Processing status can then be used as a validation check to allow or prevent status changes of a change record.