PE-Engineering Change Management

Engineering Change Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central facilitates the process of requesting, planning, and implementing changes to products. The solution is designed to provide full traceability of the changes from the perspective of Business Central. It achieves this by structuring the communications between Business Central and an engineering system related to changes.

The most common communication around changes is from engineering to operations where new or updated items, substitutions, production – and assembly BOM's and routings are received in a staging table and from there created as engineering change orders (ECO). These orders show the current, imported and updated values as well as any outstanding supply and demand orders. In this way the change can be properly reviewed before it is implemented. The details are explained in the Engineering Change Orders video.

A well-structured process around change requests is critical. Every idea related to a product has the potential to improve that product when it is manufactured, serviced, repaired, listed in a sales order, purchased from a vendor, used it in a job, or even mentioned just as a bright idea. It is important that these ideas are recorded for evaluation. Within that process patterns soon become visible, and product managers can set priorities if they see similar or repeating requests for the same item. From within Business Central, the impact of a change can be evaluated by reporting the value of inventory, purchases, and customer commitments through sales orders and Jobs. Based on this information, a well-informed decision can be made to approve or reject a request. Approval means an assignment for the engineering department. When the Engineering Change Request (ECR) is completed, engineering submits an ECO to Business Central to implement the updates. In this scenario the ECO can refer to the ECR to notify the stakeholders that a request for change has been completed. The details are explained in the Engineering Change Requests video.

To facilitate these communications ECM uses Business Integration Solutions - Connectivity Studio to create and manage flexible connectors from within Business Central's user interface. These connectors can be automated through the Job Queue or through web services. The Engineering Change Management intro and connectors video explains the details.