Now let's get an impression, why you could benefit from using Engineering Change Management inside your company.
You can use engineering change management to group together changes for different SAP objects that are affected by one change.
Engineering change management is a central logistical function for master data changes. These changes are monitored and fully documented to fulfill obligations for producing supporting documents.
You can use engineering change management to store certain SAP objects (for example, bills of material and routings) multiple times, thereby saving a history of all relevant change states.
The definition of validity in the change master or change record means that changes are only effective with the validity defined. Validity can be, for example, a point in time.
The changes are automatically made effective in areas of the logistics process chain (for example, sales orders, MRP, shop floor, and production control) by setting the release key for the area concerned.
You can use engineering change management to make changes to many objects. You can create a change definition that is valid for all bills of material and task lists. Alternatively, you can create it for specific BOM categories and task list types. For example, you can decide that any bill of material can be changed with a change number, or that only material BOMs can be changed with a change number, but not document structures.
Engineering Change Management
You can make object changes (such as BOM and routing changes) in the system, with or without history. Note that the system creates the change documents even for changes without history.
You can make object changes in the following ways:
- Changes without history:
You do not need to document these changes as they take place when the product is being developed. The status of the object before the change is not saved. You can use the change documents only to find out about the status of the object indirectly.
- Changes with history:
You must document these changes because they take place, for example during production. Both the before and after change states are saved. In addition, the system creates change documents. For some objects, these change documents differ from the documents the system creates for changes without history.
ECM in the SAP system enables you to document changes in their entirety, for example, to cover product liability requirements.
Structure of a Change Master
Now let's check the structure of a change master record.