Change Management and Revision Control
This page provides you with a document about how to manage changes using OpenBOM
Change management is a critical aspect of any product development process. It involves tracking and managing changes to the product or project, ensuring that stakeholders are informed and that the changes are implemented effectively.
OpenBOM helps you to automatically keep track of changes and manage revisions of data (immutable records to preserve released records of the information). Both mechanisms are flexible to give you a way to organize change management processes in your organization.
In OpenBOM, change management can be broken down into four main activities: automatic change tracking, item revisions, change requests, and change orders. Let’s talk about each of these separately.
Change Management Fundamentals
Revision Samples and Demo
Change Orders Samples Demo
Change Management and OpenBOM subscriptions
OpenBOM change management support is divided into two levels – (1) Revisions and (2) Change Management.
History and Revision control: It includes basic revision capture for items in catalogs and history of changes in items and BOMs. Any person with edit access can create a revision. It is easy, simple, but not a ‘controlled process’. These capabilities are available in all subscriptions where users can create items and BOMs. (eg. Team)
Change Management: A controlled mechanism to create revisions via creation of change orders and change requests (revision candidates) that requires approvals. The approval process is defined in the Template and you can define many process types (templates). This capability is only available for Company subscriptions.
More information about updated subscriptions can be found online – OpenBOM Pricing.
Change Management Fundamentals
The entire product management lifecycle in OpenBOM include multiple stages starting from creation of items (for any type of parts and assemblies), defining attributes for lifecycle control (eg. State), capturing history of changes (automatically), managing revisions (immutable baseline) and management of controlled changes (change request and change order).
The overall process map is described below.
The following picture shows you the detailed logical model of OpenBOM change management process and interoperation with design process (CAD systems).
3 Steps of Lifecycle Process
Item Lifecycle Process includes 3 steps: Item edit (latest state), create change request (revision candidate) and change order (a collection of change requests).
Revision is a simple command that can be executed from item or BOM. Here is an example of revisioning and how revisions show up in the OpenBOM BOM user interface.
Let’s talk about each of these elements of change management separately.
Automatic change tracking
This is the simplest thing and it is happening automatically. Whatever you enter into OpenBOM with items (catalogs) or BOMs is automatically captured and preserved in the history of changes. OpenBOM will track who changed what and when and will allow you to access this full history infinitely.
Item Revisions
Item revisions are the most basic form of change management in OpenBOM. They are used to capture an item data snapshot (including BOM) and provide you with a baseline saved in time. If the item has attachments (saved in reference property types), all these attachment files will be preserved together with the Item revision.
To make an item revision in OpenBOM, users can simply open a catalog or BOM and use the “Create / Save Revision command”. Keep in mind, your administrator should be switching change management Off to give you access. The revision mechanism is also configured by default in any account.
The following picture gives you an idea of how it works. You can see two revisions (R1 and R2) created for the same item over time.
Change Requests (CR)
The difference between revision and change requests is all about control and approval. In case you don’t want to allow anyone to create revisions whenever they want, you can put a roadblock with the approval-change request. Once, a change request has been approved the revision is created.
Keep in mind that, the change request is not changing the way the result (revision) will be saved, it has an impact on the process. The idea of a change request is to create a candidate for a revision that will be reviewed and approved. Once approved, the revision will be created.
To create a change request you need to ask the admin to enable change management processes and then a “change request” command will replace the “save/create revision” command. If the change request (CR) is not approved then all data about the revision candidate will be dissolved.
Change Orders (CO)
The most complex form of making changes – Change Orders allows you to group one or more change requests and get them approved in a single command. Usually, they are more formal processes, more people can contribute multiple change requests (CRs) to a specific change order and, once approved, all CRs will be transformed (automatically) in the revisions.
Change orders can be created together with CR (change requests). You can create a change order to hold a single change request or can combine them together.
Revisions Sample
The fundamentals of data management in OpenBOM are creating Items and BOMs. If you want to learn more about OpenBOM catalogs read this article – Organizing Items in Catalogs. Once you have items organized in catalogs, you have a basic record of anything – standard parts, assemblies, materials, etc.
Items, Catalogs and Revisions
In my example below you can see the OpenBOM catalog with item records. The revision function allows you to see all revisions of a selected item as well as create a new revision. A revision is a record that represents a snapshot (immutable copy) of the item data.
You can edit data freely in the catalog, but once you reach the point when you need to create a revision record, you just use the “Create Revision” command, which will do a new record (revision).
Once you have it saved, you can get access to all revisions stored in the history.
BOM Revisions
Now, since we learned about simple items and revisions, let’s discuss what can happy when you have an item that is an assembly or, in other words, it has a BOM. A BOM is a list of other items used by the assembly to build it.
Once you want to create a revision for an item that has a BOM, the prompt will be different and OpenBOM will ask you if you also want to create a revision for all items in the assembly. We will talk about the pros and cons of this choice in a separate article. At this point, we will check [x] and create revisions for sub-items.
As a result, you will get a BOM where all items will be revisions (new revision will be created) and the revision will be also created for an assembly item itself. See the picture below.
Video Demonstration
In the video below, you can see a demo of the revision process.
Change Order, Change Requests and Approvals Sample
Let’s talk about how a single person can approve CO and CRs. In my next article and video, I will speak about how multiple people can collaborate and be engaged with the CO and CR reviews and approvals.
Change Requests (CR)
A Change Request (CR) is a candidate for a revision that can be created for any item in OpenBOM. CR captures the changes of the item (eg. any attribute change or file attachment) and waits to be approved by a single person or list of people.
Change Order (CO)
Once created, the CR can be attached to the Change Order (CO), which can hold multiple change requests (CRs). During the review process, all CRs will be reviewed by the team of assigned reviewers and approvers before they will be approved.
Once all CRs are approved, a revision for all items will be created and technically change is completed. The history of the change orders holds all COs ( open, approved, and rejected). If rejected, nothing happens and no revisions will be made.
OpenBOM’s COs are tightly integrated with the rest of the platform, making it easy to manage changes across multiple BOMs and projects. For example, a CO for a part change in one project may require updates to multiple related projects, ensuring consistency and accuracy across the board.
Change Order (CO) and Change Request (CR) Video Demo
To demonstrate OpenBOM’s Change Management feature, let’s consider a simple example of an assembly in a complex device that will require cost reduction change by replacing components with a new cost. You can see how CRs will be created by both items (to reduce cost) and then a CR will be created to capture changes of both components in a single BOM
Watch the video online.
Collaborative Review and Approval
The final stage of the Collaborative Change Order Approval process is collaborative approval. This process involves all stakeholders who need to review and approve the change order, including the Engineer, Manager, and any other relevant team members.
During the collaborative approval process, each stakeholder can provide feedback and suggest changes to the change order. The Engineer can make any necessary adjustments based on this feedback and resubmit the change order for approval.
Once all stakeholders have reviewed and approved the change order, it can be implemented into the product’s lifecycle.
Watch the following video to learn more about the change management process and follow step-by-step instructions.
Change Order Templates
OpenBOM allows you to configure multiple change management processes. You can do it using OpenBOM Change Order Template mechanism. In a nutshell, it allows you to customize change orders and create multiple templates to fulfill different CO capabilities (eg. ECO, MCO, etc.) Each organization can set up its own approval templates to capture different change information as well as to customize the approval flow.
Change Dashboard and Settings
A new Settings in the Change management dashboard gives you the ability to define multiple templates and define metadata as well as an approval list. In the picture below, you can see how each template can be created.
Once templates are created, you can select the needed template. Of course, you can adjust the template later.
The mechanism of change request and change order creation remained the same. So, in my example, I navigated to a specific part to create a revision candidate (using change order) and created a change request to approve it. However, you should notice all custom attributes for the change order.
The created change orders appear in the list with all captured information, So you can see how all CO attributes (metadata) are presented when you create a specific CO. Once the approval is made, a revision for the part (or BOM) is created.
CO Templates Demo Video
In the video below, you can see how the new Change Order templates can be created and used for a simple process of management of part changes.
Change Management and Notifications
OpenBOM provides you with the notification mechanism allowing you to to notify people they need to approve a Change Order or notifying that revision was created. It helps you to allow for better control of who is getting specific information and notifications for each change order.
Change History, BOM Compare and Change Reports
OpenBOM keeps the full history of all changes. Everything is traceable and discoverable. OpenBOM is managing changes separately for each BOM and catalog. You can navigate to the list of changes using the “History” panel.
You can create a report with a list of changes that were made in a BOM between revisions. There are two methods to make a comparison between two revisions.
BOM Compare
Change report [old]
The BOM Compare function works by displaying a side-by-side comparison of any two BOMs or revisions of the bill of materials. This makes it easy to identify differences between them at a glance, such as new components added or removed. It also allows users to quickly spot any discrepancies between different bills of material, such as incorrect part numbers or incorrect quantities listed.
The old “change report” function allows you to create an Excel report outside of OpenBOM. The report results are “was-is” style and show differences between two revisions. Please note, this is a legacy function and it works only for changes made in BOMs (excluding import functions). So, if you’re making changes, this function can give you results. Note, will be soon replaced with the BOM Compare Export function.
Here is an example of how a change report can be generated.
The output of the change report is an Excel file, which includes the list of all changes that were made in the BOM between selected revisions.
Revisions and Multi-level BOM Structures
OpenBOM supports two mechanisms for revisioning of product structures (aka multi-level Bill of Materials). These methodologies are applied to situations where an item (BOM) revision is created and items have sub-levels (BOMs). In such a case OpenBOM allows you to apply two revision methods:
Default (bottom up).
Revise all sub-levels (top down).
In the first method, an item revision doesn’t impact sub-levels. When traversing to the sub-level, it will capture all “last revisions” saved before. So, the result of this function is a BOM structure created from all sub-level BOMs and Items.
This is an example of bottom up method:
A second method (revise all sub-levels) allows to create “next” revisions for all sublevels and items. So, after applying this type of revision, all sublevels will have a revision equal to a previous revision +1.
In the picture below you can see a simple scenario when the sub-assembly was revisioned first and later was included in the revision of the top assembly.
The top-down method is useful to organize a baseline first and then follow the bottom-up lifecycle. In the picture below you can see how to introduce a baseline revision for all sub-levels in the assembly for R1.
Using File Attachments in Revisions
OpenBOM manages files and makes them an integral part of item, BOMs and revision control. Each item record or BOM record allows you to attach multiple numbers of files. Associated files can be attached using Reference Properties added to item or BOM records. It allows you to manage a fully representative set of design data associated with items and BOMs.
Keep in mind that managing files attached to OpenBOM Items creates a robust mechanism to control CAD files (eg. Solidworks, but not only).
The file storage access is available through the Edit Reference dialog for any Reference property type. Read more about it in the File Management section of the documentation. Read more below here.
PDF and other viewable formats viewed in the browser with optional download. Files associated with revisions are unique to the revision. In other words, if you upload a spec to an item then make a Rev A, update the spec and make a Rev B, you can go back to the Rev A and see the spec as it was in Rev A. Here is a video demo of how to manage files with Item revisions: