The Delete / Change utility renumbers items, including all history records (all tables).

Why not just create new item codes (however you wish), and mark the old codes as Inactive?

We want to preserve all of the history associated with those items. What is the best practice for this type of procedure?

The history would be safe in the old item codes.

If you need the history associated with the new item codes (instead of the old), then renumbering is your only option.  Try it in a test company first before using the Delete / Change utility.  There is no "undo".

Will do. As far as running a VI Job to import the csv into the IM_DeleteChangeItems or IM_DeleteChangeItemsWork table, do you think that will do the same thing?

Importing into the table is a good idea, but ignore the work table.  That is just for printing.

Make sure you understand the columns (...the names are very misleading).  A mistake can end up merging item codes.  Enter one row manually then use ODBC to see the extra field values (for setting up the VI job properly).

Gave it a shot in test, and the VI Import Job writes to the utility table perfectly and is then pre-populated into the utility when you go to open it after running the VI Job. The catch is to include a line item number column (1 through n) in your .csv file before running the VI Job. It imported all 173 records in the test environment. Thank you for your help!

Test the renumbering too.  173 items could take more than a day, if you have a lot of data, and the system would be unavailable while it's being processed.