How can I find information about production order changes?

I want to know when a specific production order has been changed, and what the change was, for example a change in production order start date or change in order quantity.
Even if there is no session in BaaN that can show this information, there has got to be some sort of a log file that I can retreive this from?

The reason for wanting this info is that we (unfortunately) in certain situations need to document that a production order change is the reason for ingoing material shortages, and not the purchaser's fault.

Looking forward to your replies!

Hi,
Taking into consideration that Baan IVb might closely resemble IVc, there isnt any setting you could turn on to give you indication of changes in sfc. However, there are lots you could do outside Baan. If sfc tables arent touchy like some tables in Baan, then you could create a trigger on sfc001 or even cst001 tables to send mails as and when certain fields are updated. This could be done from within baan(if baanIV has the trg modules) or through the database triggers.

The other option is to run a scheduled query which queries the (sfc, cst)tables against a set of local tables that holds the values of the fields you want to monitor. Each time the change happens, the new values replaces the old values in the local tables and whenever this happens a notification is sent with the old and new values.

The third option, which i dont recommend but is an option neverthless, is to turn on auditing. It is extremely tedious as it creates a lot of log files and you have to write a program that reads through these log files and sends notification as to when a particular change has taken place.

There might be other ways, but these are the ones that comes to my mind on a lazy morning...

sk

Hello,
Thank you for your reply. It is a bit cryptic to me with the sfc/cst tables and so on, but I will present this to our experts and see if they are able to figure this out.
Thanks again!

By sfc/cst, i was talking about the tisfc001 table and ticst001 table. The first one holds production order details while the second one holds the materials related to the production orders.

sk

OK, I understand.
I am familiar with tables, but I didn't connect "sfc" with tisfc001. Anyway, instead of having to create a new session that provides us with the information that we were looking for, here is what we will do:
A nightly job will create a file which list the tables providing us with the following information: production order number, effective date, production start date, quantity and order status on all production orders in the system that are not closed. Each night a new file will be created. When necessary, we can look into the files that have been created, and find out which date a specific order has been changed, whether this is a new production start date or a different quantity. A little bit of manual work, but sufficient enough for me. Hopefully, in later versions of BaaN, a much more simple solution will be available. Perhaps a session called "Print Production Order History" that displays all production order changes could be available.

In addition, since all our routings and BOM's have dates in the past, we have managed so that the Effective Date field always fetches the current date and locking this, thus unabling this field for input. Then the effective date field will be a reliable source for displaying the date when a production order has been placed in BaaN. Otherwise, this field could be changed whenever one wants, as long as the order has not been reported on.

Thank you for your inputs, and have a nice weekend!