Use the ECM+ Impact Agent to ask "What's the impact of an ECO?" in Copilot chat and receive a natural-language summary of the business impact. The agent validates the ECO, presents the impacted product lines for your confirmation, runs the Dynamics 365 Business Impact analysis, and returns a summary that covers the affected documents, the key metrics, and the severity classification with its reasoning.
Prerequisites
The ECM+ Impact Agent is deployed and accessible to you in Copilot chat.
The engineering change order exists in the system with at least one impacted product line.
You have security access to the ECO and its related impact data.
The Business Impact logic is available and functional in the Engineering change management module.
Steps
Open the ECM+ Impact Agent in Copilot chat.
Enter an impact question that identifies the ECO, for example:
"What's the impact of ECO-12345?"
"Show me the business impact for ECO-12345."
"Analyze ECO-12345."
Review the agent response:
If the ECO has a single impacted product line, the agent runs the analysis automatically.
If the ECO has several impacted product lines, the agent lists the products and asks you to choose. Respond with the line number, the product ID, or all.
Review the impact summary that the agent returns. The summary includes the affected document counts by type, the quantities, the top impacted areas, and the severity classification.
To continue the analysis, select one of the follow-up options that the agent offers, such as viewing a detailed breakdown by document type, running a what-if analysis, or comparing the ECO with another change.
Results
You receive a natural-language summary of the business impact, including document counts by type, quantities, and the top impacted areas.
The agent classifies the severity and explains the reason. When a rule triggers, the agent cites the rule; otherwise, the agent cites the threshold that the change exceeded.
The agent preserves the conversation context so that you can ask follow-up questions.
Example
The following example shows a standard impact analysis:
User: What's the impact of ECO-12345?
Agent: ECO-12345 "Upgrade hydraulic cylinder specification" has 2 impacted products:
HYD-CYL-200 (V-001 → V-002) - BOM Modification
HYD-PUMP-ASSY (V-003 → V-004) - Route Change
Which product would you like to analyze? Enter a number, product ID, or "all".
User: 1
Agent: Impact analysis for ECO-12345 - HYD-CYL-200. The change to HYD-CYL-200 propagates to 3 downstream products (the selected item and the assemblies that consume it). In total, 15 downstream documents are affected across those 3 products and 2 companies, totaling 156 units over 4 document types. The largest impact is on sales orders (6 documents, 45 units), purchase orders (4 documents, 80 units), and production orders (3 documents, 25 units). 6 units of existing inventory across 4 warehouses may require disposition.
Note
When a change has no downstream impact, the agent confirms that no open sales orders, purchase orders, production orders, or inventory transactions are affected, and that the ECO can proceed without operational disruption.
If the ECO number does not exist, the agent asks you to verify the number and try again. If the ECO is in draft status with no impacted products, if you lack access, or if the Business Impact calculation times out, the agent returns a corresponding message instead of a summary.