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Ask a factory how a product change happens and you often hear the honest version: someone edits the BoM, tells the supervisor, and hopes. Then a customer receives the old revision, or purchasing buys components the design no longer uses, and the cost of informal change management arrives as scrap and rework. Engineering change management is version control for physical products — mundane until the day it is not.
What matters here
- Versioned BoMs — every revision preserved, with what changed, who approved it and when it took effect.
- A change workflow — proposals reviewed and approved before they alter production, not after.
- Effectivity — the change applies from a chosen date or order, so work-in-progress and component stock are handled deliberately.
- One current truth — the floor, purchasing and quality all reading the same active revision, always.
The main options
Odoo PLM wraps exactly this around your production data: engineering change orders carry the proposed BoM or routing edits through review and approval, with the differences between versions shown explicitly, and only approved changes update what Odoo Manufacturing releases to the floor. Because Odoo Purchase buys against the same records, superseded components stop being ordered the day the change lands, and updated inspection criteria flow into Odoo Quality with the revision instead of by memo.
How to choose
Start by versioning your five highest-volume products and routing every change — even trivial ones — through the workflow for a quarter. The discipline feels bureaucratic for two weeks and indispensable after the first prevented mistake. If customers audit you or your sector demands traceability, the change history doubles as compliance evidence you no longer have to fabricate from emails.