Tracking New Item Master/Item Branch Setup

Background - we are a multi-national company with manufacturing in two countries. Many of our countries share products. Additionally, items may be set up by one department, but not understanding the impact on other departments (for instance, marketing may request a new SKU for a product revision, but operations isn't aware of a change in order to register the new SKU with the government, creating potential delays in customs).

We are struggling to communicate when new item master / branch records are set up. We aren't able to use the date fields on Item Master or Item Branch tables because these are constantly being updated by MRP and every time we hit the save button.