Managing technical changes is a reliable help in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in order to be successful in a world of short product lifecycles, increased quality and reliability requirements, and an increased focus on product safety.
Engineering change management helps to plan and manage product versions, as well as manage product lifecycles and technical changes.
Key Features:
- Product-Version Management
- Advanced product release functionality that allows you to maintain product master data in a legal entity (the engineering company) and publish the fully configured shared product to other legal entities
- Rules to verify that required information has been entered before activating a product version (readiness checks)
- Technical change requirements and change orders supported by workflows
This illustration shows the new module „Engineering change management“
At the beginning, an engineering organization is defined. The latter owns the engineering data and is responsible for product design and product changes.
Only in this engineering organization can technical products be created. In order to create a technical product, some basic settings must be made in advance. These are:
- Set product dimension group
- Create engineering product categories
- Set rule for product version number
An engineering product is a product that is versioned and controlled through the Technical change management. Changes during its lifetime can be controlled, and the change information can be saved with change orders.
The technical product has details of the engineering product category. Based on this, it can be recognized as a technical product.
The “Engineering > Engineering Change Management > Engineering Versions” tab adds a BOM to the product and activates it.
Once a technical product has been completed, it can be shared with selected legal entities.
Release product structures
A product release wizard opens under the “Product > Maintain > Release product structure” tab.
Under released product details, the product structure can be checked again and settings can be made to release the BOM.
In the technical change management parameters, the Product Acceptance field can specify whether the products should be accepted manually before release.
In a manual acceptance, open product releases must first be checked and accepted in the legal entity. “Administration for technical changes > General > Product releases > Open product releases”.
Readiness checks
Readiness checks are used to ensure that all required master data for a product has been specified. If there is an open readiness check for a product, it cannot be released or used in transactions.
Readiness checks for new products, new variants, and new engineering versions can be created.
The following types of tests are available:
- System check – System checks whether a valid record exists.
- Manual check – User checks whether the record is valid
- Checklist – Users answer a series of questions using a checklist, and the system checks the answers.
Product Lifecycle Management
As a technical product goes through its life cycle, it is important to be able to control the allowed transactions for each status. Managing for technical changes helps manage lifecycle states.
A new lifecycle state can be created under “Managing for technical changes > Set up > Product lifecycle status”. In the “Activated Business Processes” tab, the allowed transactions can be set for the lifecycle state. Technical products use the same product lifecycle status as standard products.
Transactions distinguish between: “Allowed”, “Blocked” and “Allowed with warning”.
Technical change requirements and technical change orders
Technical change management provides structured processes for managing changes to technical products.
The following processes can be used:
- Change request – Propose and request changes
- Change order – Make changes
Each user has the possibility to record change request, this can be, for example, a proposal to improve an existing product.
A new change request can be created under „Management for technical changes > General > change management > change request“.
In this example, a customer change request was created as an application.
After there is created a change request and change order, a process follows for review and approval, to assess the impact on existing transactions, and to track changes. This process is controlled by a workflow.
Here are more information´s about managing technical changes from Microsoft.
The specialists from Dynamicon many years of experience support trading and production companies in various industries in optimizing and systemic mapping of your processes for different supply chains in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
Please arrange an initial discussion or workshop with our experts on your requirements in the area of supply chain management.