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 Engineering Change Collaboration

Purpose

You can use this business process to include external manufacturing or design partners in engineering change processes. Historically, engineeing change management only encompassed inhouse processing, from the initial engineering change request (ECR) to the implementation of the engineering change order (ECO). This process allows for the inclusion of external partners in different stages of the process, for example in the request, approval, or implementation phase.

Prerequisites

You have implemented the Development Collaboration process. In this business process, you publish product data relevant for engineering change collaboration from ERP to cFolders.

Process Flow

  1. Create Engineering Change Request

    The manufacturing or design partner creates an engineering change request as a new engineering change number (ECN) and links it to an object, for example a bill of material or a document, that corresponds to product data that has been published from SAP ERP to cFolders. Alternatively, you can import an ECN in a PDX package. A new version of the product data is created in cFolders and assigned to the ECN. This allows you to use redlining for BOMs, meaning that you or your partner can easily identify proposed changes by using the BOM comparison function.

    You can use a status profile to trigger the processing of the ECN. A status action sends a notification to the relevant user, user group, or role to inform them that action is required.

  2. Collaborate on Engineering Change Request

    You can either completely process the ECN within the cFolders system or you can publish it to a backend system using application program interfaces (APIs). If you choose to publish it to a backend system, you can include the external partner in any phase of the change request process by publishing intermediate versions of the ECN to cFolders.

  3. Download Engineering Change Order

    After the ECN has the status Approved , you can release it as an engineering change order that is to be implemented by the external partner. Your external partner can view all pending ECNs within a collaboration, and can drill down into the ECN that is to be implemented, from where he or she can export the ECN as a Product Data eXchange (PDX) package . After implementation, he or she can change the status of the ECN in cFolders to report the actual implementation date of the ECO.