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Table of contents
1 Overview .............................................................................. 3
1.1 Introduction.................................................................................................................................. 3 1.2 Assumptions ................................................................................................................................ 3
3 Footnote ............................................................................... 7
harlex
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1 Overview
1.1 Introduction
Along with vendors and materials, the customer master is one of the key master data objects to be loaded as part of a SAP migration. The customer data will be very important to your clients business and, as a result, you need to make sure that you get the data correct in this area. This white paper will look at some of the different aspects of the customer master and some of the main issues that arise when trying to migrate data into an SAP system.
1.2 Assumptions
The best approach to loading customer master into SAP is via LSMW using either the standard load program RFBIDE00 or the customer master IDOC or BAPI.
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2 Discussion Points
2.1 Address Data
One of the main attributes of the customer is the address data. This is important for delivering goods to the correct place, billing the correct company, etc. As part of migration, the address data is often found to be inconsistent in the legacy system through years of maintenance by different users. A migration is a good time to review and improve such data. This is known as data cleansing. It is normally best practice for the cleansing to occur in the legacy database prior to the migration so that the migration is a clean and transparent as possible. Examples of inconsistencies might be: The Address city may be Kiev in some addresses, in others, Kv Some telephone numbers may have brackets around the area code, others may not Some addresses may be missing a postal code which isnt mandatory in the legacy system but which may be in SAP
As data cleansing often involves heavy user interaction, its often beneficial to look at ways in which the migration team can help, eg. using an ABAP routine within the LSMW to format the telephone numbers correctly. Another option might be to use a middleware system such as DataStage or Informatica, but this will be discussed in a separate paper. The best method for loading customer master data is by using the LSMW tool with the standard program RFBIDE00 which creates a BDC session to be processed. Some extended address data (held in table ADRC) is not found in the standard structures for this program but this is easily solved by creating a simple recording which can populate up the missing fields. Another LSMW option is to use the BAPI which creates customer master IDOCs in the DEBMAS structure. This option is also flexible and benefits from being based on SAP standard programs, but the IDOC processing is less transparent than the BDC and it is rather slow when processing large volumes of data. Also note that even though many of the address fields for customer master are length 40 (or more in later versions) you should not use more than 35 as many SAP standard programs only look at the first 35.
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3. Apart from update loads, there are also other dependent objects such as pricing conditions, sales orders and open AR items where your source file will normally reference the old legacy IDs. SAP has provided a field called Previous Account Number (KNB1-ALTKN) stored at the company code level. This is where you would commonly store the legacy number. This works even on multicountry projects where the same customer may exist in different legacy systems, because the field is at company code level. If it is not sufficient due to multiple legacy customers in the same company code pointing to one customer, you may need to consider other options such create a custom table or using multi-value characteristics in customer classification. The person responsible for building the LSMW load program should also create a routine which enables other loads to find the new SAP customer for a given ID by interrogating the chosen field.
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You would assign these files to the different segments in the target structures of the standard program input within the LSMW. Note that the Sales Area could be further broken down in more complex projects so that there are multiple distribution channels and divisions per sales org, in which case this file structure would still hold. Also, remember that one feature of a normalised system such as SAP is that customer-dependent data will pull through information from the customer master. Many of the fields on the customer master are shared with the sales order object for instance. So when a user is creating a sales order manually then they dont have to type a lot of the information each time; they type in the customer and that brings in a whole wealth of information into the order automatically. (This is the same with materials and vendors, e.g. purchase orders and goods movement documents). Bear this in mind when mapping data. It may be that a default is made in the customer and isnt that important because it is going to be altered in the dependent sales order e.g. some shipping information.
2.6 Reporting
Often on a project the sales group and sale office set up is a key reporting feature that impacts directly on the loading of customers. It is advisable to speak to the functional consultants and business early to ascertain whether the structure has been defined and how the customers can be mapped to the structure. Other fields used for reporting include the customer group fields: customer group 1, customer group 2 etc, which can be customised according to the clients requirements.
harlex
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3 Footnote
Customer Master migrations, as with all aspects of an SAP project will vary from client to client. There are inevitably data load requirements specific to your own project. For further information on customer master or indeed any data conversion topic, please contact Harlex Consulting Services Ltd at info@harlex-ltd.com.