A product change notice (PCN), product discontinuation notice (PDN), or end-of-life (EOL) notice can only be tracked and audited if the same information is captured every time. This reference defines the standard fields a supplier notice contains, the common change categories, and a tool-agnostic set of status and disposition codes for moving a notice from receipt to closure.
It draws on JEDEC standards JESD46 (Customer Notification of Product/Process Changes) and JESD48 (Product Discontinuance), together with common industry practice. Field sets and status taxonomies vary by organization and quality system — adapt these to yours.
Supplier notices fall into a few standard types. The type sets which fields matter most — a discontinuance, for example, hinges on last-time-buy and last-time-ship dates.
The fields below appear across most PCN, PDN, and EOL notices. The tag shows when a field is generally required, recommended, conditional, or specific to a notice type.
The change category drives the kind of review a notice needs — a material or process change usually requires qualification review, while a datasheet change may not.
A consistent status set makes a PCN backlog measurable and auditable. These are tool-agnostic — map them to whatever statuses your system supports.
The disposition records the decision a team reaches for an affected part. One notice can reach different dispositions for different products.
Whatever you use to track change notices — a spreadsheet, a PLM or QMS module, or dedicated PCN software such as PCNshark — capturing this field set and applying a consistent status taxonomy is what makes PCNs measurable, auditable, and hard to lose. For how the end-to-end workflow fits together, see the PCN management guide and the component obsolescence response guide, or browse more references in Learn.
Last reviewed 2026-06-29
