A question is are we using best practice to make these changes to the External CO? Or should we be changing the Internal CO? 

We have found there is no fool proof method to manage this within IFS.  We have an external change order process that requires any changes to be submitted to a Sharepoint site for review and approval.  The change order is reviewed by Sales Admin and Manufacturing prior to approval.  Manufacturing are responsible for undoing affected reservations or unissuing affected pegged shop orders before approving the change.  Once manufacturing and sales admin agree to the change (commercial effects to customer contract and inventory/finance related issues to the internal orders are clear), only then is it passed to Customer Order Entry to change the order.  The change must always be initiated on the original sales order (external to customer) order first, then follow through with the Incoming Customer Order Change messages.  Yes, it is tedious, but there is no other good way to see that all of the orders are updated.  We have problems with the follow up too and things get lost, stuck, or hung at times.

If we change the Internal CO, will it provide an error message to the Customer Service team and/or once that changes are made, will it update upstream to the Internal PO and Internal CO?

No, if you start on the internal orders, there is not a notification or update back upstream to the external order.  Always start from the top down, rather than the middle or the bottom up.

Hi,

One option is to enable the online mode on the site:

Then if you change the external CO, all the replication and messaging will be handled on-line (in case you also have all the approvals as automatic as well). This means that when you change the external CO it will be like changing directly on the the internal CO as well. You will get error messages fired for the scenarios you mention above, e.g. cannot reduce quantity when reserved etc. 

//Fredrik

Thank you, we will test this. 

We tested in our TEST environment and it works great. One question, is there any risks we should be aware of before turning on in our Live Production Environment?  Things we may not think to test?

We tested External Customer orders changing dates, quantities and cancellations and saw the messages needed for most of them. There were a few that still were lacking warnings, but working much better with this setting turned on.

I don’t see any risks with this. We are actually running the same code that you do in the normal messaging logic, but we run everything online.