About Manufacturing Change

The manufacturing change features of Manufacturing BOM Management help to formalize, document, and control the manufacturing change process for manufacturing parts and MBOMs. A manufacturing change order (MCO) or manufacturing engineering change order (MECO) is required to release any manufacturing change. For details about manufacturing change lifecycle states, see MCO (Standard) Lifecycle or MECO Lifecycle.

See Also
Creating an MCO
Copying an MCO
Creating an MECO

An MCO is automatically generated when generating or updating an MBOM for a plant. The MBOM can be generated from an EBOM.

A manufacturing change can occur in any of the following cases.

  • Engineering-initiated changes: Design engineering changes released by CAs are automatically copied onto corresponding MBOMs as changes. The system automatically creates new MCOs to release these changes.
  • Manufacturing-initiated changes: Manufacturing engineering can initiate changes in a BOM that do not violate design engineering intent by either creating a new MECO or MCO, or using an existing MECO or MCO in the Create state.

    The following are the possible types of manufacturing changes that can be initiated through MCOs:

    • Releasing support, material, or tool parts.
    • Adding, removing, or replacing support, material, or tool parts in a BOM
    • Changing make/buy codes of parts
    • Selecting a manufacturing substitute/alternate in a BOM
    • Copying BOMs from one plant to another

The Business Administrator can set up a customization where the system will automatically promote MCOs that are in the Release state to the Implemented state when they reach their start dates. See Manufacturing BOM Management Administration Guide: Promoting MCOs to Implemented State.