Change management overview

Every single change in OpenBOM is recorded and preserved forever. Micro-changes (i.e., small steps) in how you changed data are recorded and can be performed, reversed, recorded and queried. In this fashion, OpenBOM provides a way to track all changes after the product has already been designed and goes into ‘real life’ with ECO, MCO, service changes and many other processes.

OpenBOM handles changes that permit two or more users to make and track changes to the same BOM, in parallel. A typical example is changes applied to Engineering via CAD, procurement, and supply change planning. Working with Excels sent back and forth is suboptimal, painful, and error-prone.

OpenBOM change management consists of three features which together provide change management capabilities not available to spreadsheets:

(1) OpenBOM tracks a full History of changes.  Everything you and other users do in a BOM is trackable and searchable. Click the “History” button and you’ll see a History window appear on the far right with a history of all changes made to the BOM, organized by BOM revisions.

(2) Create BOM revisions. Revisions are an immutable snapshot of a BOM at any moment in time.  You can create new revisions and review previous revisions to eyeball changes or differences. Click “Save new revision” to create a new immutable revision of your BOM at the precise moment in time. Name the revision (optional).

At any time view saved revisions by clicking the “Latest state” drop-down menu to the right of the green “Revisions:” label.

(3) Create and download change reports between BOM revisions.  OpenBOM provides you the ability to download an Excel report of changes between any two previously created revision.  It’s a simple list of differences between the selected revisions. Click “Change Report” in the History window:

Select between the “from” and “to” saved revisions and click “Download change report” when ready:

An Excel change report will automatically download to your PC or Mac:

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