Changes With and Without History 

For technical and commercial reasons, it is necessary to change industrial products from time to time.
Technical reasons for changes include, for example, technical faults that have to be put right and the introduction of new environmental or safety regulations. For commercial reasons, it may be necessary to start using cheaper materials or to change a product to suit customer requirements.

In the SAP system, you can make changes to objects both with and without history.

Changes without history

These are changes that occur during the development phase of a product and that are not documented. The state of the object (for example, bill of material or task list) before the change is not documented. When you change and save data, the old data is overwritten. You can only recall the data that you saved last.

Changes with history

These are changes that may affect further activities in the procedure and should thus be documented. For example, changing a material could incur a change in the bill of material (BOM) and likewise then the task list and inspection plan.

In the SAP system, you can document changes with Engineering Change Management. In the case of specific change objects (such as a material, document, or bill of material), Engineering Change Management can be used separately for each object.

The following section describes how to make changes using Engineering Change Management.