An Easy Alternative to LSMW to Update Customer Master Records in SAP

The Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW) is a technical tool provided by SAP to help with the data migrations during initial implementations. It is also used by some SAP customers to make mass changes to master data in SAP.

This article describes an easy non-technical alternative to update customer master records in fewer steps than LSMW; without technical involvement or requiring extra-authorizations in SAP.

Using the tools and techniques described in this paper, hundreds of SAP customers are realizing vast productivity improvements in their SAP data loading and data update projects. Moreover, these projects are being carried out by business users themselves.

A recent series of published articles 1 2 3 4 describe a business application common to many SAP customers ? making mass updates to data in SAP R/3 or mySAP systems. The particular application of interest in these articles is to make a mass change to customer records such as Sales Office, Sales Group or Customer Group fields via the XD02 transaction in SAP.

In the referenced articles, the suggested tool for making such changes is the Legacy System Migration Workbench (LSMW) tool from SAP. The articles give an excellent description of LSMW and go through a series of 14 steps involved in making a mass change to the customer master data.

In this article, we introduce a much easier alternative to make such a mass update to the customer master records. We will show how the TxShuttle software can be used to easily accomplish the same business application in fewer steps. These steps can be run by business super-users or functional analysts without requiring extra authorizations to run LSMW sessions in SAP.

In this whitepaper, we introduce the TxShuttle program and show how simple it can be to update customer master records.

The process of mapping the Excel columns with the SAP fields is as simple as dragging and dropping the Excel columns shown in the Excel Preview to the SAP Fields on the top-half of the mapper screen. At the end of the drag-and-drop operation, the mapper appears as shown in Figure 4. Excel column A is mapped to the Customer Account Number field, column B is mapped to the Sales Organization field, and so on, for all 7 fields that were touched during the recording.

Once the mapping is complete, we are ready to run the transaction. As shown in Figure 5, simply open the XD02 script in TxShuttle, point to the Excel file that you wish to upload, specify the start row, the end-row, and the column for the results to be logged in. Once all the input parameters have been specified, click on the Run button to start the upload of the Excel file into SAP.

The user is prompted to log on to SAP just before the run. This logon verifies the user has authorization to run the XD02 transaction. If the user has the appropriate authorization, the transactions are processed in real-time and the messages coming back from SAP are displayed in the column specified as the log column, as shown in Figure 6. Transactions that result in an error are clearly highlighted. The records with data errors can be fixed and a second upload run can be performed only for those records.

The audit-trails in SAP are completely preserved with the name of the user who carried out the upload.