Process an engineering change request

The person responsible for engineering change requests can see in the Industrial Equipment Manufacturing-ECR Manager role center the number of ECRs and their status. To review the impact of the ECR, run the Impact Report from the ECR ribbon, which shows the inventory on hand, the replenishment orders, and the sales orders.

The ECR process is controlled through a STAEDEAN lifecycle. The states must represent the company's business process for handling ECRs. The ECR Status field is updated through the settings table of the lifecycle. The ECR lifecycle is also integrated with the Dynamics 365 Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Document Approvals, which means an approval request is created from the lifecycle.

Steps

To run the Impact report:

1. Choose the   icon (Alt+Q).

2. Type Engineering Change Requests to open the list of ECRs.

3. Select an ECR from the list and open it.

4. Locate ECR Cost Impact Report in the ribbon and select it to open the report's request page.

ECR status codes

In the legacy versions of ECR (Dynamics D365 BC), the status codes were set through a lifecycle. The app versions no longer support a lifecycle: instead, the flow of status codes is handled as follows:

ECR Approval Status Codes

Approval is handled either from the ECR card or through Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central's Workflow. Engineering Change Management ships with a template to create a workflow from template. Once created, set an approver and enable the workflow. In the Engineering Changes Setup, the setting Use Approval Workflow controls this. When on, the workflow must also be created from the template and enabled.

The ECR status codes are:

• Open: initial status of the ECR.

• Pending Approval: set when approval is requested, by the Send Approval Request action.

• Approved: set when approved, by the return value of the Approval Workflow.

• Rejected: set when rejected, by the return value of the Approval Workflow.

• Processed: set when processed by the connector.

A Specific Approver for the ECR can be selected when the following setups are completed:

• The ECR Approval Workflow is installed from the template and enabled.

• In the workflow responses, Approval Limit Type must be set to Specific Approver and a default Approver ID must be selected.

• In User Setup, ECR approvers must be checked in the ECR Approver field. You cannot set yourself as ECR Approver.

With these setups, the Specific Approver field on the ECR card is enabled. The approver selected in the card replaces the default approver in the workflow.

ECR Lifecycle

When the app Product Engineering-ECM Status Management is installed, ECR approvals can also be handled by a lifecycle. When Engineering Change Management detects that a released lifecycle exists for ECR, the approval functions described above are hidden.

Note

Product Engineering-ECM Status Management requires the app Product Engineering-Item Status Management.

Before creating a lifecycle, create the lifecycle type: