Making Mass Changes to SAP Data in Record Time with Minimal Resources




 

  A WHITE PAPER BY WINSHUTTLE, INC. 1729 208TH STREET SE, SUITE 202 BOTHELL, WA 98012, USA (800) 711-9798 WWW.WINSHUTTLE.COM

Making mass changes to SAP master data or transactional data is a constant requirement in today's fast-changing business environments. Mass data change projects, however, are resource-intensive, time consuming, and stressful both for the SAP business users and for IT analysts. This article describes some of the best practices that many companies have adopted and are able to make mass changes to SAP data in record time with minimal resources.
  
Whether you are an SAP end-user or an SAP functional analyst using SAP's Financials and Controlling (FI/CO) module, the Human Resources (HR) module, the broad Logistics (LO) mode, one vexing problem that you most likely have been affected by is the need to make mass changes to the data in SAP. In today's ever-changing business environments, mass changes to ERP data have become a fact-of-life. These mass changes could range from master data changes in material master, vendor master, customer master, employee records, or pricing conditions, to transactional data updates in sales order, purchase orders, vendor invoices, or customer invoices. Despite being a daily challenge, mass data change projects at most companies continue to be resource-intensive, time consuming, and stressful not only for the SAP business super-users and functional analysts, but also for the IT support team. The three options for making mass changes to SAP data at most companies tend to be (1) Using the SAP mass-change transactions, (2) Making the changes via manual data entry, or (3) requesting the IT support team to build programs and scripts to automate such changes. The SAP mass-change transactions are only useful for fairly simple data change scenarios where one or more fields need to be changed to a constant value for all records. Most mass changes scenarios are more complex than that and the second and third options are the ones mostly chosen. Both the options -- manual data entry and IT support requests -- end up being fairly resource-intensive and time consuming. Why the first option of manual data entry is not an ideal-choice is obvious, but there are several reasons why the second option is not ideal either.
DECEMBER 1, 2005
 © WINSHUTTLE, INC. 2005 MAKING MASS CHANGES TO SAP DATA IN RECORD TIME WITH MINIMAL RESOURCES
Writing programs for a single mass data changes in SAP can be a fairly involved process involving several steps such as, requirements definition, design, coding, testing, and documentation. Since every mass change request may be different, the entire process has to be repeated for every such request. Moreover, IT's programming resources tend to be expensive and may not be always available. The SAP support teams are constantly struggling at prioritizing such mass change requests among their many other mission critical projects. Therefore, all-in-all the second option of requesting the IT support team to build programs also becomes a not so desirable proposition. Many companies using SAP, however, have adopted some good practices and tools that are enabling them to make mass changes to SAP data in record time with minimal resources. These practices are affording these companies the following benefits:
They are saving on data entry resources by eliminating redundant manual data entry.
They are saving time by updating SAP data instantly.
They are able to reassign the valuable IT resources to more mission critical projects by reducing programming efforts for mass change projects.
They are reducing data errors due to manual data entry or due to hastily put-together programs. The next section of this article describes these best practices for mass changes to SAP data. This section will be followed by a specific mass data update example and how these practices are used, and finally some success stories will be presented.
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This section describes the best practices in making mass changes to SAP data that we've discovered by interviewing SAP users at hundreds of companies. Using these practices, these companies were able to make mass changes to SAP data very efficiently and cost-effectively. ... [download for more]