Engineering Change Management (ECH) controls and documents related changes to basic data and ensures a regulated flow of changes into operational structures.

An important characteristic of SAP ECH is its full integration into the logistics supply chain of your company. ECH ensures that planned changes to the basic data in the operational functions of sales and distribution processing, production planning, material requirements planning, shop floor control, product costing, quality management, and materials management are automatically read at a certain point in time. SAP ECH can be used for the following SAP basic data objects: BOMs, plans, documents, materials, objects from the classification system, such as characteristics, classification, or object dependencies Important change statuses of documents and material can be indicated by revision levels.

A change is clearly defined and set in the SAP System by means of a change master record. You differentiate between an engineering change request and an engineering change order independently of the status of the change master record. This difference represents the approval procedure and release approval procedure in a company and can be additionally supported by SAP Business Workflow.

The engineering change request can be created in a purely descriptive form without reference to related objects. Otherwise, you can enter the objects in the engineering change request if they are already known at this time. When you approve an engineering change request after checking, the status Approval granted is set and the engineering change request is converted into an engineering change order. You can now change the relevant items with reference to the engineering change order.

Because change master records can be classified in the SAP Classification System, it is possible to structure changes and find them easily.

The combination of many change objects in a change master record can cause the change lists to become difficult to read in some cases. Additionally, very complex change plans require organization specific processes for different objects, such as BOMs or routings. You can use the hierarchy of change master records to structure complex product changes more clearly in different views, for example, organizational or functional. An engineering change hierarchy is constructed out of change master records with the functions leading change master record and change package.

In addition to time-related change validity, that is a change is valid after a set date, parameter effectivity can be used. The effectivity type time interval is defined as part of the standard SAP System that you can use, for example, to control seasonal product changes. The serial number interval allows you to include object change statuses dependent on serial numbers of an end product. In addition, you can define further enterprise-specific effectivity parameters with types of your choice.

You control the release of changes into the operational areas by means of a release key in the change master record. The change statuses of all objects that were processed with this change master record are read when you set the key to released.

You can carry out not only a global release process for all operational areas, but also a release for individual enterprise areas. In this way, the release for calculation, planning, and production are supported.

ECM is integrated with Order Change Management in order to allow changes up to the very last minute. Order Change Management (OCM) is an easy-to-use way to change already processed production orders to fit the changed product structure. The trigger can be set off by either releasing an engineering change, or a change supplement, or postponing an engineering change, or when a customer’s wishes change, for example, configuration changes are made.

The electronic signature was created in order to, on the one hand, permit effective IT-supported engineering change management in business software and, on the other, satisfy the legal requirement for having approval documents bearing signature of the responsible person on file a given length of time.

The SAP Engineering Change Management supports the electronic signature as part of the approval process.

You can stipulate in Customizing whether one or more electronic signatures are required to set a status in the change process for every status of engineering change requests and engineering change orders, as well as object management record.