Setup: Changes

The Changes collections define the attributes and workflow for changes that affect your parts and documents.

• Change Classifications: You can use this collection to specify the impact of a change and which business rules are affected. A typical choice might show a "non-interchangeable" versus "interchangeable" (backward compatible) change. In a contract-driven or custom-products company, you may prefer to specify whether a change that affects performance, cost and/or schedule requires customer approval.

• Change Priorities: A change can have important cost impact. Change costs are often determined by how fast the change must be executed. By setting a change priority, users can control the urgency of implementation, and propose that the change be synchronized to a date or serial number.

• Change Reasons: You can classify the reasons why you decided to make a change. For instance, if you're frequently making changes because your production team has trouble finding specified parts or is constantly discovering lower-cost suppliers, perhaps this shows a problem in how your designers are choosing vendors.

• Disposition Actions: Item dispositioning activities, which identify what needs to be done to support the release or cancellation of an item, can be classified beyond what is provided in the default collection.

• Disposition Locations: You can classify item disposition locations or expenses incurred during the release or cancellation of an item.

• Problem Sources: A problem source classifies who or what brought an issue to your attention. This can help identify the point at which repeated design, production, and customer issues are occurring.

• Change Forms: Smaller companies typically need very few change types: perhaps just a change notice. Larger organizations, or those who work within a regulatory environment, may require adding pre-production releases, purchased part releases, change requests, stop ships, corrective and preventative actions, etc. You may also make change forms based on group responsibilities (production engineering change order, purchased part release, supplier request and others).

  The ideal is to use as few change forms as possible, each having as few reviewers as possible, coupled to the simplest satisfactory workflow.

1207