Baseline vs. branching strategies for versioning MCOs in change management

singhdata
Tue, 22 Apr 2025 10:15:00 +0000

I’m interested in how different organizations approach versioning strategies for Manufacturing Change Orders. We’ve been using baselines to capture snapshots of MCO states, but I’m seeing more teams adopt branching approaches for managing parallel changes.

Our current baseline approach creates snapshots at key milestones - initial review, approval, and implementation. This gives us good audit trail and rollback capability. However, when we need to work on multiple variations of the same change simultaneously (different production lines or customer-specific modifications), baselines become cumbersome. We end up with numerous baseline copies that are hard to track.

Branching seems attractive for parallel change scenarios, but I’m concerned about traceability and the complexity of merging branches back together. What are others doing? Has anyone successfully combined both strategies?