ECOs

An ECO (Engineering Change Order) is a proposed change with an approval trail. In simple-plm an ECO is a YAML file that describes what is changing, why, and who signed off — sitting alongside a Git branch that contains the actual part- and BOM-file edits the ECO authorizes.

States

An ECO moves draft → review → approved → released. A reject sends it back to draft.

draft — the author is still editing. No reviewers notified.
review — reviewers are pinged. They comment and vote.
approved — quorum reached; the ECO is ready to release. The underlying branch is mergeable.
released — merged into main and tied to a release tag.

A rejected ECO drops back to draft for revision; nothing is ever silently dropped. The full state-transition log lives in the ECO YAML file itself.

Who can review

Reviewers are configured at the org level. Members with the reviewer role can approve; owner and admin are reviewers implicitly. See Organizations for the role table.

On disk

id: ECO-2026-014
title: Switch C12–C18 to AEC-Q200 grade
state: review
author: alice@example.com
created: 2026-04-12
reviewers:
  - bob@example.com
  - carol@example.com
parts_changed:
  - C-100N-0402
description: |
  AEC-Q200 part is in stock and ~3% cheaper. No fit/form impact.

The dashboard renders this as a friendly review screen with side-by-side diffs of the affected part and BOM files. See plm ecos for the CLI.