➡️ CDHDR&POS ⬅️ – demon to some – angel to others

Many of you focusing on value creation through process mining in SAP systems touching 2 data base tables:

• CDHDR – reads ‘SeeDeeHeader’
• CDPOS – reads ‘SeeDeePos”

These tables store information about data that was changed. The header Table tells you the object and the time of change, the Pos table keeps track of the initial value, and the changed to value.

The concept is easily understood by looking into an example :

• You want to change the MRP Type of Material A456 in Plant 0815 from PD to ND
  • (your MRP Controller complained about a recurring exception message from the MRP run that the material status does not allow for planning ( he said he was using SAP SIGNAVIO Process Insights – Process Performance Indicator KPMRP00260 ‘Combinations with MRP list exceptions during rescheduling)
• You make the change in MM02
  • in the background, the SAP System updates the corresponding field on Data Base table MARC, and inserts two entries, one into CDHDR and the other into CDPOS
• You can see this by getting back to the material master, displaying the changes to the material.

All good, so we did a change to some active plant specific material master data, and we left a trace of the change on the change document tables.

This is relatively straight forward, and pretty interesting as you may want to understand the sequence of changes

So, analysing Material Master changes is super straight forward 😎.

😬 But assessing other type of changes e.g. in the area of Purchase Orders can lead to difficult conclusions, and sometimes to complete misinterpretations.

Here is a little snapshot on PO Changes

While what you see makes sense, it is pretty misleading : So here is what you need to keep in mind when assessing change patterns on POs or PRs

• One CDHDR – CDPOS tuple does NOT necessarily represent an isolated change activity🥴
• One manual change to a PO can lead to a cascade of changes 😶‍🌫️

In other words, if you measure 100.000 Changes to POs in one month (by counting CDHDR entries for object type Purchase Orders in a time frame) – the amount of manual activities may be as small as 1% of it only.

So this is why I recommend to review any analysis that is based on CDHDR and CDPOS entries – as sometimes your ‘discovered gold’ may slip through your hands. SAP PROCESS INSIGHTS helps you doing this, since it provides a powerful set of additional information describing the change, and if you are into process mining, you may observe the cycle times between the different change events – a cascade of automated changes will show cycle times of almost 0 😉

Any thoughts, comments, complaints, tears, conclusions, observations? I would love to hear back from you, either directly through this post, or you can reach out to me directly.

Happy year end !