Background: ECO Maintenance

Use the ECO Maintenance (ECO) program to enter, change, or close an engineering change order (ECO). During the initial entry of the ECO you identify who requested, authorized and/or pre-approved the change. You then assign appropriate priority, compliance and implementation levels, identifying required signoffs. See Road Map for work flow.

You can improve control over component specifications, assemblies and documents used in the manufacturing process by implementing PowerShift's Engineering Change Order (ECO) feature. ECOs enable you to make changes in an offline system where you can track and evaluate costs of the changes and other impacts. The approval system takes control of routing the ECO for necessary approvals. Once approved, the ECO Processing (ECOP) program moves the changes outlined by the ECO to live data.

This topic has these subtopics:

ECO Numbering
Selection Lists
Notes
Item Selection
Pre-approval
Miscellaneous Costs
Approval
Implementation and Processing
Statuses
Audit Trail

ECO Numbering

The standard XOC Numbering System Setup program allows you to determine how the ECO number will be generated.

Selection Lists

This program accesses many supporting table applications so you can select from a list of available choices.

Pre-approval

The Pre-approval section is an information section that represents the approver signatures on the request for engineering change. If you add approvers in the Pre-approval section, then when the ECO is sent out for signoff, these approvers receive a copy of the ECO based on the Document Output Parameters Maintenance (TDOC) setup for copies.

Notes

When you create an engineering change order, you can indicate who authorized or pre-approved it. The first four lines of notes coded to print “Before (B print code)” are used to identify the basic reason for the engineering change. You then select the appropriate priority, compliance, implementation, signoff and change type codes entered in the table programs.

Item Selection

Click the ECO items button to enter the item numbers impacted by the ECO. For each item entered, a new ECL level can be assigned. If the ECO is releasing a new item number, you are prompted to complete the necessary fields as if you were completing Enterprise Item Maintenance (IM). You can also complete Vendor Price Maintenance (VMM) and the branch data (Branch Item Maintenance [IMB] and Item Cost Maintenance [ICM]).

Miscellaneous Costs

You can enter up to 999 miscellaneous costs that are not covered by any other field. For example, miscellaneous costs can be one-time charges, expenses, or re-tooling costs. When you click Exit, the program rolls up costs for you.

Approval

You control who will be approving the ECO change based on the selected signoffs. Signoffs refer to the job titles or functions. The normal approval hierarchy and approval maintenance applications (APPHM and APPM) are used to set up the individuals who will be approving an ECO.

When the ECO entry is complete, click the Appvl/Signoff button and each required approver will have an open approval task added. This makes the PowerShift menu Approval button active for the required approval parties. Use the Document Parameters Maintenance (TDOC) program for copies to control the distribution of the ECO document.

Implementation and Processing

When all required parties have approved the implementation of the ECO, it can be processed. Processing the ECO takes the information from the ECO and applies it to the live files. This includes:

  • Adding new items to the master files

  • Adding the new bill of material

Based on the ECO implementation setting, any appropriate changes can be completed to the production ECL level in the Branch Item Maintenance (IMB) program.

Note
All engineering change orders need to be processed, even those without bills of material.

Statuses

Engineering Change Order status definitions:

Status code

Definition

Description

O

Open

Open but no processing completed

P

Processed

Processed but still open

F

Completed

All implementation approvals received

C

Closed

Closed by the user

Audit Trail

To activate an audit trail, select one of the files listed below in the Audit Trail Maintenance (XAT) program. The system records all transactions. You can then run the Audit Trails (ATR) program and select that file to print a report of these transactions.

  • PE1: ECO Master

  • PE1CM: ECO compliance list

  • PE1I: ECO Effectivity list

  • PE1L: ECO line detail

  • PE1LC: ECO line detail comments

  • PE1P: ECO Component changes

  • PE1PD: ECO Parent item selection

  • PE1PR: ECO Priority list

  • PE1S: ECO Sign off list

  • PE1T: ECO type of change list

  • PE2S: ECO Implementation List