Engineering change requests

Completed

The engineering change request process allows any user to request a change to an engineering product. Allowing any user to make requests provides an opportunity to systematically suggest product improvement, generate ideas for a new product, or report an issue with a product. After the change request has been submitted, the product owner or users within a workflow will review and act on the requests.

Create a new engineering change request

To create an engineering change request, follow these steps:

1. Go to Engineering change management > Common > Engineering change management > Engineering change requests and then select New on the Action Pane.

   Alternatively, you can open the Product details page for an existing engineering product.

   On the Action Pane, on the Engineer tab, in the Engineering change management group, select Engineering change request > New engineering change request.

2. In the Title field, enter the text that briefly describes or identifies the changes in the request.

3. In the Priority field, select a value to indicate how high the priority of the change is. 

4. In the Category field, select a value to describe the type of change that you are requesting.

5. In the Severity field, select a value to indicate the severity of the issue that should be fixed by implementing the request. 

   The Requested by, On, and Status fields will auto populate.

6. The Change order field is the change order number if the change request was followed up on through a change order.

7. On the Information FastTab, select New to upload a file, an image, a note, or a URL as they pertain to the change request.

8. On the Products FastTab, add products that are affected by the change request.

   

Evaluate the business impact of a change request

When a change request is created or submitted to a workflow, the product owner or workflow approvers must evaluate the change request and its impact on open transactions. To accomplish this task, you can search for dependencies, which are any open transactions such as sales orders, production orders, and on-hand inventory, that must be evaluated before you make a change.

To evaluate the engineering change request, follow these steps:

1. Go to Engineering change management > Common > Engineering change management > Engineering change requests.

2. Open the change request on the Action Pane.

3. On the Action Pane, on the Change request tab, in the Business impact group, select one of the following buttons:

   • Search - Scans all open transactions and then opens the Business impact to open transactions dialog box, which lists all transactions that are affected by the change. In the following image, the red boxes indicate the type of transaction that has the product in them and how many transactions on each page.

   • View previous search - Open the Business impact to open transactions dialog box, which lists the previous search results. (A new search isn't run.)

   

4. If the issue that requires a change is critical, you can select Block order to block the open transactions, or you can select Notify responsible to notify the responsible user in the Business impact to open transactions dialog box.

5. Select Approve on the Action Pane to accept the change request.

Create a change order from a change request

When the engineer or product owner who reviews the change request decides that a change order needs to be created, they can create the change order directly from the Engineering change request page.

To create a change order, select Copy link and products on the Engineering change requests page, on the Action Pane, on the Change request tab, in the Engineering change order group.

Follow the steps in the next unit to complete the change order.