Change notice best practices

The following lists some best practices to consider when working with change notices (CN).

• After you send items to a CN, deal with orphans right away. This is for several reasons:

  • When you open the Orphaned Items window, it displays all orphaned items detected for the End Item in the current Change Notice, not just the ones relevant to your selected items.
  • You will have remembered exactly what changes you just made to the items and BOM, which makes it easier to figure out what to do with your orphans.
  • It is likely the case that multiple people are working on different elements of the final product. If you leave orphans to build up, you often won’t remember which ones were related to your items and it’ll be harder to know what to do with each one.
  • Further to the first point, there are change request primitives that your Tenant Administrator may build into a change request (CR) workflow to automatically create a new CN once the current CR workflow is finished. This can be useful to ensure you always follow a revision and release of an item with a new CN.

• If in doubt, after selecting all released items in the CN, use the Redistribute Items function rather than returning them. In fact, click this button every time you create a new CN and ensure you review the Orphaned Items window. This ensures you won’t accidentally order the same item a second time and keep on top of your orphans.

• If you make a mistake, such as accidentally redistributing items, submitting the wrong type of change notice, or submitting one under the wrong workflow, you can always discard your change notice and start again. Ensure your Tenant Administrator has configured the option to cancel the workflow at any point along the workflow.

• Use the CN Description, Notes, and/or Disposition column to give a more detailed explanation of the purpose of this CN and why certain items are being returned or redistributed. This helps others who are approving the CN understand what to look out for, and can then be passed onto your procurement team so they have a better understanding of how to deal with the items in the CN.