SAP S/4HANA 2020 Fully-Activated Appliance: Known Issues

This blog covers latest information and known issues for the SAP S/4HANA 2020 Fully-Activated Appliance series (2020 FPS02 / 2020 FPS01 / 2020 SP00), delivered via SAP Cloud Appliance Library (SAP CAL).

The overview blog for the appliance can be found here.

The known issues for older appliance releases are here: 1909 / 1809

If you would like to ask a support question, please do so in the SAP CAL Community.

Technical Topics

Initial system performance after instance creation or re-activate

When you create an instance or suspend / re-activate it, the system performance will be slower, especially within the Fiori Launchpad. Also, the first click on a Fiori tile will be significantly slower. This is due to initial caching in the system and will become faster if you continue working.

Other performance tuning tips are:

• Choose the cloud provider location nearest to you (for good network latency)
• Fiori rendering performance on the remote desktop is often slower than on your local laptop
• The demo users contain a relatively large number of roles and Fiori tiles. You can copy these demo users in TCode SU01 and adapt accordingly e.g. remove roles, create your own roles / Fiori catalogs, or personalize the Fiori launchpad.

Note to SAP administrators: SGEN has been performed to pre-compile ABAP coding.

Transport system (STMS) is not configured by default

Please check the SAP standard documentation how to configure the transport system in a new system.

Messages about faulty HANA plugins versions (vch_old, afl_old, …)

The appliance contains orphaned metadata for some HANA plugins (plugin names are vch_old / afl_old / sap_afl_sdk_apl / sap_afl_sdk_apl_old).

This won’t affect the use of the appliance but may cause some confusion in transactions such as ST04 or /n/SAPAPO/OM13 that display an error message for the plugin status.

To remove these messages, run the following command from the SQL console in HANA Studio for both the system and tenant DB:

TRUNCATE TABLE _sys_afl.plugin_errors

Fiori & User Interface

Problems with Fiori notifications (“bell icon”) and My Inbox

Symptom:
When you start the appliance for the first time, some demo users (e.g. S4H_SD_DEM) will see existing notifications (such as sales order approvals, etc.) in the Fiori notification icon (“bell icon” on the right upper corner in Fiori).
If you click on one of these items, you will jump to the “My Inbox (All Items)” app and receive an error popup (detailed error message contains >/IWFND/CM_MGW/051</code><message xml:lang=”en”>Resource not found for the segment ‘TaskCollection’).
If you open the “My Inbox (All Items)” app directly – without using the Notifications icon – you will see items in the inbox that are different from the ones under the notification icon.

Resolution:
a) To solve the majority of the inconsistencies between the items in My Inbox and the notifications icons, log on to SAP GUI, enter tCode SE38 and execute the program RSWF_PUSH_NOTIFICATION_EXECUTE with the standard parameters (block size 10.000; next try 3.600). You will receive a number of “notifications in error“ from the report which you can ignore.

b) The faulty link from the Notifications icon to the My Inbox app can not be solved easily for the remainining notification items, please delete them manually from the Notification icon if they bother you. To configure a working link between Notifications and My Inbox for future notifications, please log on to the SAP GUI, enter transaction SWPA and click on the button “Further settings…”. Edit the text line and change the value in column Current Value from LOCAL to LOCAL_TGW. Save and choose/create a customizing request.

If you now create new workflow items, the navigation between the notification icon and My Inbox will work, however, you will need to run the program RSWF_PUSH_NOTIFICATION_EXECUTE again to see new items under the notifications icon.
If you intend to use the workflow & notification more often, it is recommended to schedule the above program to run regularly e.g. every few minutes (via tCode SM36).

Note:

Please note that we don’t make extensive use of the workflow in the existing demo scripts for the appliance. An easy way to trigger a workflow for testing purposes is to create a sales quotation as described e.g. in the “Sell from Stock” scenario in chapter 3.1. (user S4H_SD_DEM). In addition to the process described there, navigate to the tab “Reason for rejection” and enter “Newspaper advertisement” as Order Reason. This should trigger a workflow that can then be processed e.g. with users S4H_SD (the creating user S4H_SD_DEM will also work).

No Fiori tiles displayed in client 400

When you log on to client 400 in Fiori, the launchpad loads but no tiles are displayed and you see an error message “Failed to load catalogs”.
This is due to the deactivated Gateway service in client 400, you can resolve it easily via activating this service.

• Log on to client 400 in SAP GUI (BPINST / Welcome1)
• Enter tCode /n/IWFND/IWF_ACTIVATE and choose Activate
• Enter tCode SU01 and assign at least one business role to user BPINST (e.g. SAP_BR_SALES_MANAGER), otherwise the launchpad will remain empty for this user)
• Afterwards, refresh Fiori and tiles should load
• Note: The tiles won’t show meaningful demo data and some of them might not load correctly (since not all of them are configured in client 400).

Error when jumping between two WebGUI transactions in Fiori

When trying to jumpi from one WebGUI app to another one, you receive an error such as “webgui_min.js:532 WebSocket connection to ‘wss:…” in the browser console. This happens eg. from the Fiori app “Display Material” (MM03) via More > Material > Change > Immediately or from the Display Sales Order app VA03).

Solution:

1. Open transaction SICF in SAP GUI and click Execute

2. Navigate to “default_host > sap > bc > gui > sap > its > webgui” and double-click it

3. Click change and open tab Service Data > GUI Configuration

4. Change the value ~SINGLETRANSACTION from 1 to 0 and Save (customizing request for foreign namespace will be needed).

We will change this behaviour in the upcoming FPS01 release.

Issues with specific business scenarios

Service: Errors in browser pop-ups (503, not secure)

There are issues with browser pop-up Windows that are triggered by “actions” e.g. when calling a print-preview for order quotations, or triggering the creation of a follow-up document for an opportunity.

Only partial configuration of “Treasury” scenarios

The SAP Best Practices scope for treasury scenarios is not fully configured in the 2020 SP00 appliance release. The following scope items are delivered:

• J77 Advanced Bank Account Management
• J78 Advanced Cash Operations
• 4MT Advanced Payment Management
• BFA Basic Bank Account Management
• BFB Basic Cash Operations

Treasury scenarios that are not working as expected might still be fixed by applying the missing pieces manually in your system instance.

Manage Purchase Requisitions – Professional app

When trying to run a consumable procurement process (account assignment type K), the Manage Purchase Requisitions – Professional app throws a misleading error that G/L account is not assigned to Company Code, despite customizing settings being done. The current workaround is to run the process via the SAP GUI transaction.

Manage Order Bill of Material

When one tries to create an Order BoM by copying an existing Material BOM via the Manage Order Bill of Material Fiori app the base UoM is hardcoded to EA and not editable. If the Material BoM has a different UoM then EA, a Save error will triggered and the Order BoM will only be saved as draft. The current workaround is to run the process via the SAP GUI transaction

Data Migration / Migration Cockpit: ERP 6.0 EHP8 (IDES) performance in “direct transfer” scenarios

The CAL solution for the ERP 6.0 EHP8 IDES system (needed for the direct transfer data migration scenarios) has a very slow initial performance e.g. when logging on to it or creating the first data migration projects. The performance will increase significantly when working with the system and once caches and batch jobs have been processes (this might take a couple of hours)..