Mild Rant: SAP Notes are getting harder to find

When I’m not on a project, or racking up points in Coffee Corner, my day job is SAP technical support at a government office.

Often, a support issue presents itself as a weird error message that alarms the users. See exhibit A (below).

In the old days, my strategy for resolving this issue would be:

• Do a little debugging to determine the message id and number (“PSCD_FACTS_EN” and “020”: Entry too long. Type &1 allows max. &2 characters)
• Go to the ‘Search for SAP Notes’ screen and type in that exact message code (“PSCD_FACTS_EN020”)
• Find the right note – pretty much immediately – and implement it.

Problem solved, and I’m finished in time for morning smoko.

Not any more!

• A search for ‘PSCD_FACTS_EN020’ turns up nothing.
• A search for ‘PSCD_FACTS_EN’ turns up many notes, none of which match the issue I’m investigating
• I read through each note, looking for something similar. This requires a fair amount of ‘fuzzy’ logic
• I find a note that mentions ‘length of character’. Hmm, looks promising, but we already have it.
• By luck, I notice that there are two additional SAP notes which correct this note
• Bingo! One of them contains the text : “Entry too long. Type LANGUAGE allows max 1 characters.”

OK, maybe it’s partly my bad – I could’ve debugged further to the method where the error is raised, and searched on that as well. But does it really need to be so hard? WWGD (What would Google do?)

My question / rant  / challenge to SAP Support is:

If a note is created to fix a specific error message, shouldn’t it be searchable by that message (PSCD_FACTS_EN020) , or at least by the message class (PSCD_FACTS_EN)?

It would make our job a lot easier.

I’m trying to be specific & constructive here, but in general I think that SAP Support Notes are getting harder to search. It seems I just have to keep trying before I hit the jackpot.

Thanks for listening. I feel better now.