Entering the Enhancement Pack Recovery Program

Last week we upgraded to SAP ECC/ERP enhancement package 7.  We missed a few things and I want to take the time to thank SAP Support for their fast help and responses.

One item I want to highlight is the importance of reviewing the Product Availability Matrix (aka “PAM”) before going up on enhancement packages in your SAP ERP system.  I failed to do that this round, and see my lesson learned below.

Figure 1: Source: SAP Platform Availability Matrix BI4.1 (aka PAM)

Note that service.sap.com/PAM will tell you the site has been migration to the new SAP Support Portal support.sap.com – and unfortunately there are no quicklinks to the PAM there (meaning support.sap.com/PAM doesn’t work).  I submitted this in the Portal feedback form.

Figure 1 shows Crystal Reports 2013 data source accesses.  Crystal Reports 2013 (and predecessors Crystal 2008/2011) has always provided the best integration with SAP ERP as it has provided connections to SAP tables, SAP InfoSets and ABAP functions.  Having direct access to the ERP tables means there is no data modeling required or extra development involved.  You as the report developer are not required to know SQL or anything else – just report on it.  Of course you don’t want to do this against high volumes of data.

However, clicking on the hyper link CR 2013 RTC Data Access provides this:

Figure 2: Source: SAP

Notice the “Source version” column in Figure 2 shows “6.0 EHP6”

I contacted SAP Support who says “Please note that, In Crystal Reports 2013 up to EhP 6 is supported….EhP7 is not supported for CR2013.”

OK, to quote San Diego Chargers Coach Mike McCoy “no excuses” from my side, the PAM is the official channel, and I didn’t check this before we upgraded our ERP system, but you should for your future enhancements.