|
Routine uploading of data from Excel files to SAP remains a thorny challenge facing many companies today. Business users are feeling the pain of manually re-keying Excel data into SAP; while programmers in IT departments are having to constantly write new programs to automate the upload of Excel files to SAP. This article describes 7 best-practices that many companies have adopted in automating the upload of Excel data into SAP. Adopting these best practices will alleviate many of the pains that business users and IT analysts face in uploading Excel data to SAP.
Even with the standardized business processes and centralized data stores provided by SAP, much corporate data still resides in spreadsheets. Taking data in these spreadsheets and putting them into SAP remains one of the thorny challenges facing many corporate IT departments. Many business departments are wasting resources in manually reentering this data into SAP while introducing errors due to manual data entry. Functional and technical analysts in the IT departments are inundated with requests from business users to automate the upload of Excel data into SAP.
Are you an SAP business user looking to reduce manual data entry for mass uploads or mass changes to SAP data, particularly when the data already exists in Excel?
Are you an IT functional or technical analyst looking for ways to service the end-user requests for data upload more effectively?
Are you looking for ways that your company can save time and resources in SAP data management?
This article describes 7 best practices in automating the upload of Excel data into SAP. Adopting these best practices will alleviate many of the pains that business users and IT analysts face in uploading Excel data to SAP.
1. Avoid Programming. With the several non-programming choices available to connect Excel and SAP, custom programming in ABAP or VB should be the absolute last resort for ad hoc uploading Excel data to SAP. Not only is programming expensive and time consuming; a program that will be used only once or even once a year particularly wasteful. Further, creating robust programs require a fair bit of testing and if a program has not been well-tested, it could be dangerous and cause irreparable data damage.
Use a scripting or a non-programming approach as much as possible. SAP provided tools such as BDC, CATT, LSMW, and third party tools such as Winshuttle's TxShuttle will allow you to avoid programming to a large extent.
2. Do Not Upload Directly to SAP tables. While this point is very obvious, it cannot be overemphasized. Writing directly to SAP tables avoids all the data validation and checks and balances that happen when creating data through the normal SAP transactions. So, avoid using any method that writes directly to SAP tables.
Always upload data via the pre-configured SAP transactions or BAPIs. Again, using tools such as BDC, CATT, or LSMW, or TxShuttle will allow the upload of data via SAP transactions instead of writing directly to SAP tables.
3. Choose a Record, Map, and Run strategy. A record, map, and run strategy generally involves first recording an SAP transaction where data needs to be uploaded. The recording step is followed by a mapping step where the SAP data fields captured during the recording are mapped to the Excel fields. Finally, the transaction is run over and over again with the different rows of data in the Excel file. A Record, Map, and Run strategy is similar to recording and running macros for automating routine tasks.
The advantages of choosing a record, map, and run strategy are that (a) it is very general and can work well for many different upload tasks and many different SAP transactions, even with custom transactions, (b) it is a very easy and intuitive approach and saves a lot of time making a mass data update, (c) it is something that even the business users can do themselves without requiring much IT support.
A record, map, and run strategy should be used for uploading data from Excel to SAP. Again, the SAP provided tools, such as BDC, CATT, and LSMW all support such a strategy and can work for many different upload applications.
|
