There’s an exciting new feature within Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Supply Chain Management – Engineering Change Management!

In manufacturing environments, good data management is required. With Engineering Change Management, we can manage our products through version control and change management procedures to increase quality and reliability, increase focus on product safety, and also to help manage our constantly changing product lifecycles.

Engineering Change Management (ECM) brings structure and discipline to the product data management process. This allows products to be defined, released, revised; all supported with workflows. Through product versioning and ECM, we can document, assess impact of changes, and apply engineering changes throughout the lifecycle of the product.

Today we want to walk through some of the capabilities of Engineering Change Management (ECM). The system has been configured for today’s demonstration.

How to Create a New Versioned Product

We will navigate to released products and start to create our new versioned, engineered product.

The Engineering Product Category will drive defaults like product templates. We create a product name, number and then click ok.

Once we have our product created, we can navigate to the Engineer tab and view our engineering versions.

Select the specific version in order to view details and information.

Engineering Change Request Form

As an engineer for DEMF, I see we have a change request form filled out for one of our versioned products. Our reason for the change, today, is from an Engineering change request because of a customer complaint from a recent sales order. You can see notes and information, the affected product, and the source of the change request. As the engineer, I have now reviewed and approved the change request and will start the change order process.

Engineering Change Order Form

I create the change order and enter in all of my change request details. I select the product and in this case, I want the impact to be a new version.

I also want to modify the Bill of Materials (BOM). I select the Bill of material tab, select the BOM, and select lines.

In this situation, I want to delete one line and add our new product. Once completed, we need to Approve, Process, and Complete the Change Order. Once processed and completed, the new version with new BOM is available to be released.

This concludes the quick demonstration of the capabilities within Engineering Change Management. This is just a simple demonstration, there is a lot of powerful functionality available, but we wanted to provide you with a quick, high level overview.

If you would like to know more about this low overhead option to manage the lifecycle of your products, please feel free to contact Encore today!