important changes on basic date without change number

Hello Dears,

At the moment we manage the material master data using the following fields:

-Ext. Matl Gr (EXTWG)

-MRP control (DISPO)

for specifying production phases in reporting matter (R/3 and BW).

Unfortunately ,by now, we haven’t used the change number for identify changes in production planning.

We built some queries and in this moment all these reports don’t manage the history change and update all the data with the values available now in the master data.

Then, in order to solve this problem, we have found 2 solutions:

First solution:

Manage change number for material master data, for Bill of Materials and for recipe.

On this solution, we would like to know if the standard reports manage change number and then manage correctly the validity of time interval.

Second solution:

We could manage a new material codification.

The actual codification is in 6 digits while the new codification will be in 10 digits.

It Will be created new material codes with the new length but for the existing material we would like pass to new codification. (we suppose a conversion activity has been done for this matter)

We know that this is a conversion project because doesn’t exist no one standard transaction available, but we wish know if you have already implemented any tool that will be useful to update all the tables in the DB where the field MATNR is used.

Will you please explain your opinion about both solutions in order to understand which way is better for Sap architecture?

Thanks in advance,

Best Regards