Achieve routing control with Engineering Change Order (ECO)

Is your Sage 500 missing out on functionality that could be achieved from Engineering Change Order (ECO)?  If you can answer “yes” to these questions, ECO might be worth a review.

• Does your business require strict controls on routings?
• Do you use blue prints or design spec as part of the engineering of routings?
• Are you required to have multiple departments ‘sign-off’ or approve routings or routing versions?
• Are your designs changed over time with later versions or models of the same product and need to be approved?

ECO allows approval coordinators to set up an unlimited amount of approval types.  These approval types can contain up to seven approval departments with the optional ability to notify departments via email when an approval is necessary.

Once approvals are set up they can be applied to the routings. ECO usage control can be applied to the routing using a valid user or to any user with a control password. These controls are put in place to protect the ECO from being applied or removed from a routing.  After the ECO has been initiated on a routing, approvals can be emailed out. When the routing has been completely approved by each department it can be set as the standard, active routing. The routing is then protected from any further changes to the version.  If changes are attempted a message appears that the routing cannot be changed, and only allows for it to be copied to a new version and only takes a couple clicks.  At this point the changes can be made with a new request for approvals, which is tied to a new version of the routing.

One thing to keep in mind with ECO is that it works best with single level bills of material. ECO does not update sub-assemblies with the new ECO routing and cannot utilize the Global BOM Replace. To get a broad overview of ECO  watch an client demo reviewing Estimate Entry and ECO in Sage 500.