Extend Material Master Data Without ABAP (100% Standard)
Hi guys. I’m sharing with you an old material I made. Sorry about the language, but it’s a step by step created to help friends here in Brazil.
The scenarios was:
– A company acquiring a lot of plants and the user responsible to extend the material master records to the new plants was spending a week to make it for each plant. They needed a faster way to extend them massively without loosing the quality and trackability.
In a macro view, the process is:
1. Configure IDoc communication (from a client to itself).
2. Configure a From/To for some fields in the IDoc segments.
3. Run BD10 transaction to send the material content.
Please check the screens bellow. If has any doubt, just ask.
BD62 to filter the plant you will use as template…
Than go to WE20 to create the configuration between clients. You’ll tell the system that IDoc will be created and sended by a client and will get inside another one, but you’ll use a connection to the same client which is sending the IDoc.
The next screen shows how it works… Using another partner as destination, but the connection will hit the sender again.
Go to BD62 to determine conversion rules… You won’t need to indicate the fields here, but only the idoc segments. We needed to extend plant information, so we configured MARC and MBEW segments to replace plant and valuation area.
You’ll need to go through these steps above only one time.
In transaction BD79 we use the rules created in BD62. Here we’ll indicate the field and the value. Here you’ll need to change the values for each plant.
You can use a constant, var or a specific rule as a From/To. We choose From/To.
As you can see, the TO field comes before the FROM field.
Same for Valuation Area.
Now the last configuration to activate the FROM/TO configurations, needed be done only one time too.
After that you need only to process the IDoc interface using transaction BD10.
You can use BD79 features to keep your From/To for any interface. Hope you have fun using IDocs…
Can you give a real good example why one would need to setup such a big process if the same can be achieved with MM17 right away?
Hi Jürgen L.
I'm not sure if you can use MM17 to extend material master creating a new record in MARC or MBEW, for example.
This configuration is not to update massively, but to extend the record. The From/To are set for key fields.
I am very sure that MM17 can create new records in MARC and MBEW.
see the tab for create in MM17:
You showed a way how you did it, whats missing is an explanation why this would be an appropriate way to go. Just doing it because one is able to do it might not be the best decision but eventually you had a use case which required this long long way.
I could think of one, interfaces that change/extend/modify the material master.
using IDOC for them is quite useful since you can keep track of all the messages processed.
Also perhaps for some initial loading when using SAP Data services (the ETL tool)...but not much more i guess.
The case was...
The client was hiring many plants... We had many material master records to extend every week.
The effort for the second, third and so on was to change the values in BD79. Simple.
And yes... Much more easier to track. Thanks, Alejandro.
I will update tomorrow to indicate the case. I'm answering using the phone. Sorry.