Change Management
This chapter covers the following topics:
Change Management Overview
Managing contract changes is one of the most important yet time-consuming aspects of contract management. Oracle Project Contracts includes a robust change management and versioning mechanism to enable contracting professionals to manage amendments and modifications to contract documents, and provides a clear audit trail of contractual requirements over time. Change management is workflow-based to implement approval and review routings of contract changes through your organization. Change management also includes an undo functionality to handle the receipt of out-of-sequence change requests to improve auditability.
Setting Up
For details on setting up Change Management in Oracle Project Contracts, see: Setup.
Implementation Notes
Change Statuses
Change statuses define the life cycle of a change request. Each change status belongs to a seeded change status type. The transition between change statuses is controlled by the status types as illustrated in the diagram below:
The shaded circles depict the default, standard life cycle of a change request. You should set up at least one status for each status type in the standard life cycle.
You can associate a workflow process to each change status. This workflow process will be initiated when a change request is set to the corresponding status. Default workflow processes are provided when the product is installed. You can tailor the default workflow processes to fit your business needs. We recommend that you use the default workflow processes as a basis for copying new workflow processes instead of modifying the default workflow processes directly.
You can use workflow processes and change statuses to automate the processing of change requests as much as possible. For example, you can tailor the workflow processes to skip the approval step altogether if your organization does not require approvals for change requests. However, you can only implement one change request per contract document at any given time. A change request is considered being implemented when the change status is of type In Progress. We recommend that you do not eliminate the In Progress step when you streamline your change management processing.
See Also
Change Types and Change Reasons
Change types and change reasons can be used to route different processing logic when customizing the workflow processes. For example, a customer-initiated change request may be subject to a more thorough approval process then an internal-initiated change request. You can use a different change type to denote the source of the change request.
If you wish to use change types and change reasons to fine tune your workflow processes, we recommend that you define custom workflow lookup types to mirror the change type and change reason lookup values.
Versioning
A new contract version is automatically created when a change request is changed from a status of type Approved to a status of type In Progress, and from a status type In Progress to a status of type Completed.
You do not need to implement change management just to maintain version history of contract documents. You can version a contract directly from the Contract Organizer if you are granted a role with the function Create New Version to the particular contract document.