Understanding change

Manufacturing Process Planner provides several tools for managing and verifying changes to your product structures.

• Manufacturing change notices (MCNs) are essentially engineering change notices (ECNs or simply CNs) that are specifically intended for manufacturing rather than engineering needs. Use MCNs to automatically track and update BOP and MBOM changes across views and send only information that has changed in a BOP or MBOM to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application.

• The Change Tracker view displays all changes that took place in a range defined by either unit or date effectivity. These changes can be based on incremental change, on revision effectivity, or on both. Once the change tracker lists the changes, you can mark them to indicate that they have received attention or propagate the changes to a target structure. The view can also be used to find out where and how the item revisions in a change notice affect a particular structure.

• Incremental change management is the process of controlling changes and providing an audit history of a product's definition and configuration. Caution Incremental change is an advanced change management tool. If you are planning to use Incremental change, please consult with a Siemens Digital Industries Software representative before deployment.