There are no changes made to a work order once it is created by the engineering change control. You are correct that you would need to delete and reenter the work order for the setting to take place. The planned costs are determined at the time the work order is entered so any changes made to a work order after created may result in an inaccurate planned cost.

Hello Linda,
Thank you for the reply.
I understand the theory, but to what end in Sage 100 are planned costs necessary in the accounting environment?
As I stated earlier, there are constant and on going engineering changes in our environment.
What would you recommend from a best Sage practices standpoint to minimize the effect of BOM changes on planned work orders? Is there some educational documentation that I could study?
Since I am new to the Sage environment I will be attending the Sage Summit in July in order to better understand the system.
Thanks
Bob Schrammel
Purchasing Manager
Conflex Inc

The eng change control features in Sage 100 are limited and will not really accomplish what you want. They basically perform 2 functions:
1) perform a "find and replace" in your BOM's, which can be quite handy, but for companies that need to keep track of revisions within their ERP/manufacturing system, not just in the engineering drawings/system, there is virtually no trace of the change. Sage 100 will print a register to serve as an audit trail of the changes you told it to make, but once its done you look at the bill and all you see is the result of the changes, no sign of what it used to look like.
OR
2) perform a controlled change on a specific date, with bread crumbs in the bill to show what changed. The method by which this is implemented is pretty tough to work with though. Engineers generally hate it (those who maintain the BOM's don't particularly love it either).

In short, the change control features are pretty light on the "control" side, and unlike any other BOM system I've worked with. Changes don't result in revisioning of a BOM, some aren't tracked at all, and there's no link to anything else outside of the change itself (i.e. nothing to tell you what all you have going that will/may be impacted by the changed bill). All that is manual. :-(
So work orders or production entries created from that point on get the change, but nothing currently open will be affected.

When an ECN is completed at our company, part of our checklist is to go look at all open WO's for that item or WO's which require that item as a component. WO's in a firm planned status can be modified as needed, or deleted and re-entered. Either one will work fine, because the planned costs do get updated to reflect any changes you make to the WO (whether it's released yet or not). For any released WO's, you have to assess the level of completion and determine if you can even implement that ECN or if it's too far along to change now. So those have to be handled on a case-by-case basis, and the action you take will vary depending on how far along that WO is in your process.

The planned cost itself sometimes impacts the accounting side of things, but not until completion transactions occur, and whether or not it impacts at all depends mainly on the valuation method of the build item and the cost completion method used in the work order. But in any case, the WO is going to accumulate the costs inputs you give it, and when you complete the WO it will do one of two things, regardless of the valuation and completion methods...it will roll all the costs up into the item it's placing into inventory, or it will roll up part of the costs to inventory and the other part will be posted as a variance. So I don't think you have too much to worry about on the accounting side by updating a material list or routing steps in an open WO, in terms of throwing you out of balance or anything like that. Your changes will just increase or decrease the cost of the item or the amount of the variance postings.

The main impact from changing an existing WO is less on the accounting side and more on the manufacturing/planning side. By that I mean that if some steps are already in process, or have been marked as step complete, you could get some wonky-looking analytics from those steps when trying to compare actuals versus planned.

Best of luck to you!