Windchill ESI allows you to publish Change Notices (CNs) created within Windchill ESI to a distribution target such as SAP. Publishing CNs from Windchill ESI also includes the publishing of all part, document, and BOM and option set objects that are listed, and if Windchill MPMLink is installed Process Plans and Resources. The documents that are associated to parts (and to operations and resources if applicable) can also be published. By enabling this capability in Windchill ESI, users can also create and change parts, documents, and BOMs, option sets (and Windchill MPMLink objects, if applicable) when publishing the CN.

Windchill ESI creates all CNs in SAP so that they have material master, document, and BOM objects listed on them. When processing a CN in SAP, Windchill ESI first creates the CN in SAP with the status of “Active” and a future effectivity date of “01/01/3001”. Once all of the objects related to the CN have been successfully added to the CN and modified in SAP, Windchill ESI then sets the CN status in SAP to “Inactive” and the date is changed to the current date. This prevents users from adding objects to the CN directly in SAP. If this is required, users in SAP can be granted the appropriate permissions to perform the operation.

Out-of-the-box, Windchill ESI passes various attributes of a Windchill PDMLink ChangeOrder2 object to the EAI software components:

When you associate various attributes to a CN in Windchill PDMLink, Windchill ESI passes the attributes to the EAI software components. The following attributes are passed (the list consists of both attributes of the resulting objects and those of the CN itself):

Once the CN data has been published by Windchill ESI Services, the EAI software components map the Windchill CN attributes to SAP Change Master attributes. The following table shows the mapping of Windchill CN attributes to SAP Change Master attributes.

The attribute Distribution Targets in the elements Destination and Target ID, in the ESI response, identifies the SAP client and plant in which the CN (and its resulting objects) should be created or changed. The EAI software components use this information to communicate with the correct SAP client and pass plant information to it.

The attribute Last Changed By in Windchill PDMLink identifies the Windchill PDMLink user that last updated the CN prior to publishing. The EAI software components do not pass this information to the SAP system due to SAP limitations.

There are some attributes that are required within SAP to create or change CNs that are not provided by Windchill PDMLink. In these instances, Windchill ESI defaults the values in the EAI software components prior to passing the data to SAP. The following table lists the SAP Change Master attributes that are defaulted in Windchill ESI and their defaulted values.