• You can use the BAPI BAPI_REQUIREMENTS_CREATE. This BAPI is RFC enabled so it is a good candidate if you are using an external application to perform your forecast and want to replicate them in SAP by making a remote function call.
• Another option is to use the standard upload program RM60IN01 – which is a direct input program that reads a formatted file to create your PIRs in SAP’s demand management (the RM60IN01 program can also be used in LSMW in concert wth object 0180).

In this post, I shall explore the second option. The aim of this is to have PIR figures uploaded in SAP’s demand management – i.e data populated in the table below, such that it can be taken into account by the MRP run (or not if you do not set the active indicator):

To illustrate this scenario, I’ll work through a simple case but it should give you all the tools you need to do further exploration on your own. So I will show you here how you can upload PIR quantities for multiple schedule lines for multiples materials – all in one go. Also we will want for these requirements to be active such that they are immediately taken into account during the next MRP run.

To start of let’s try and execute the program to see how it presents itself. Using transaction SE38, execute the program RM60IN01.

In the next screen you will see this.

SAP defaults the sequential file name to PP_INDEP_REQMTS_DIRECT_INPUT. I.e that is the logical filename that SAP will read to upload your PIR’s. That logical filename is transparent to the user, but it is actually mapped to a specific location – the one where the physical file will need to reside if SAP is going to be able to read it.
By default PP_INDEP_REQMTS_DIRECT_INPUT maps to a filename called RM60IN00 in SAP’s DIR_TEMP directory. If that is not a convenient place for you, that is something that you can always change. To do so go into customizing (based on ECC6.0) and follow the path SAP NetWeaver / Application Server / System Administration / Platform Independent File Names / Cross-client Maintenance of file names and paths (the corresponding transaction code is conveniently called FILE).
So at this point what we are missing is the file format expected by SAP and in order to get that information, the easiest way is to let SAP do the work for us!
Go to transaction MD61 and create some demand for anyone of your products.

Add some requirements in your planning table and save your changes.

Now go to transaction SXDB. You will come to a screen that looks like the one below (maybe some projects will be there).

Select the menu entry Goto / DX tools. This will take you to the Data transfer – tools screen. In that screen type the information as it is indicated below.

From this screen we are going to generate a template upload file. You’ll be able to use that file to get a feel for what data has to be uploaded, where it fits in the file and how it has to be formatted if you want to successfully upload your planned independent requirements.
So the next step is to generate that file by populating it with some demo data. To do that, click the “From Test Program” button located at the top of the screen. In the next screen that comes up, type the data that corresponds to the material for which we created some requirements earlier on and just click execute.

What this has done, is to create a ready for upload file using the data we created earlier on. If all goes well, you should have a message coming up, such as the one below.

If we use transaction AL11 to navigate to the logical file name PP_INDEP_REQMTS_DIRECT_INPUT which is DIR_TEMP/RM60IN00) we have should see:

So there we have it – a template with live data!
If you go back to the DX tools screen and additional feature here, is that you can edit the file you just generated. To do so, go click on the “change” button.

SAP shows you the template file you generated in a different light.

What you can also do here is to edit existing segment as well as delete or add some – just double click on a segment to do so. Any changes you do can be saved to the template file.
I also suggest that you look at every segment so as to see what other information could be contained in them. Note that if you are using configurable materials additional segments can be used to populate characteristics and their associated values. If that is your case, use the B60C1 structure segment to hold that information (as shown below).

At this point, I would like to point what seems to be a bug. If you change a record B60BL (the one that contains the material number) and save your changes and then try to process that file you will get an error message saying Number :61262 ‘Project and/or WBS element does not exist’. If you run across that problem, apply OSS note 594774 and you should be right after that.
What you can now do, is to download your file onto your PC so as to further study the file structure.
To do so, from the transfer tools menu, click the “copy” button.

Indicate the source file (the template we generated) and the target file (the one we’ll save on the PC). Note that you can use the same method to upload your file onto the server (switching the target and the source of course).

There we go – we have our template file in notepad.

We’ll now try to upload a new file. This one will have two materials and for the second material, we’ll upload not monthly but weekly buckets.

So let’s upload our new file and process it.
Note that you can, execute the program in test mode first if you prefer.

If things work out without a hitch, you will just get an information message appear at the bottom of your screen:

You might also get warning messages (especially if requirements already existed).

So let’s see what has happened.
If we look at the first material Z127 this is the material we uploaded in monthly buckets.

And if we have a quick look at the stock and requirements list, we see the requirements are ready to be planned:

If we now look at the other material Z126, this was the material we uploaded in weekly buckets.

Enjoy.

If you are using the Service Desk functionality of Solution Manager, you may know that it is possible to create support requests right from your satelite SAP system. This is a really neat functionality because it allows you to report an incident right there and then when it happens – i.e there is no need for you to connect to a solution manager system, either via the SAP GUI or portal to report the incident.

To do that, you will find a “Create suport message” menu entry that allows you to do just that.

The trouble is that if your system administrator has not done the customising that enables for your SAP system to know the destination of the incident (the rfc destination of you solution manager system), then you will get an error message such as the one below.

So to correct this you need to add an entry in the table BCOS_CUST. To add that entry go to transaction SM31 in maintenance mode.

You then need to add an entry identical to the one below (except that you must of course indicate the rfc destination of your Solution Manager system).

In the VAR scenario, the customer is expected to act on a message when the status is :

• Author Action (further information is expected from him)
• Proposed Solution (a working solution has been tested and is proposed to the customer)

Now that we have set what we want to achieve, let’s go and customise it.
==> It is assumed that transaction SCOT has already been configured in your system to send emails.

Check your action and status profiles

The first thing you need to do is to check the action profile that is assigned to the transaction type you want to customise. In my case, I’m using message SLFN and the action profile assigned to it is AI_SDK_STANDARD. Whilst we are here we’ll also note down the status profile we are using.

Customise the smartform

If you use the standard action that comes packaged in SAP, your customers will simply get an email message titled “Service message w. Transaction” and an attachment (if SCOT is set to send pdf’s) that give more information than is necessary. The point of all this, is to send a message to the customer to let him know that he is required to take action on a service request that he logged so you want this to be specific, short and sweet.

This step is optional – you can do it now or later.

Go to transaction SMARTFORMS. Select the form called CRM_REMINDER_MAIL_01 and make a copy of it.

I have called mine “ZRM_REMINDER_MAIL_01”.
Go to the Form Attributes and change the description to something meaningful.
Note in my exampe that the description terminates with a “&” Character. This character will be replaced with the Service Request number in the email.

Once you have done that go down to the mail content and change it to suit your requirement.
In my case I have conveniently added the link to the service desk portal and re-iterated essential Support Desk information like contact numbers.

This is the text of my mail.
Dear Customer,
A service request – Number: &orderadm_h-object_id& and description
&orderadm_h-description& – logged in the Service Desk has been
actionned and re-assigned to you.

Best Wishes – Service Desk Support
Tel:99999 999 999

Activate your smartform and leave the transaction.

Define a new action

Now go to transaction SPPFCADM. Here we will add an action to our action profile (the one we determined earlier).
Select the application CRM_ORDER and click on Define Action Profile and Actions.

In the next screen, select your action profile and double click on action definition.

Switch to change mode and click the new entries button.

Define a new action as I have done it here.

Two important switches here are:
The partner function – in my case SLFN0002 the message reporter. In my context, the reporter is the customer, the person that logs the service request. You could change it to another partner function to suit your needs.
Action merging. This setting defines how many times the message will be sent. In my case I want a message to be triggered every time (not just the first time) the status of the message is “author action” or “proposed solution”.
Now go to the “action description” tab and add a small text description for your action.

Now double click on processing type.

Add the processing type and mail setting as shown below.

Note that the form name is the smartform I created earlier. If you did not do that step, then use the form CRM_REMINDER_MAIL_01.
Save your work and step back to the PPF:Applications in customizing screen. Again select the application CRM_ORDER and this time click on Condition Configuration (transportable conditions).

If you are having difficulty location your action profile, click on the Technical Names button.
This will show the language independent name of your action profile.

Switch to change mode if your are not already in it.
To add the action you created, click on the create button and it from the drop down list.

As a result, your action will be added to the list of existing actions.

Double click on it and then go through the tabs as I shown below.

Click on Edit Condition.

In the next screen, give the condition a name, then click the text displayed that says “click here to create new condition (not the Create button).

This will take you to the condition editor.
Remember that we want to trigger the email if the user status is author action or proposed solution.
Double click User Status. This will update the condition expression.

Now click on the “=” button (we want the expression to be equal to…)

Now use the search help in the constant field to find the status “author action”.

Your selection will now be displayed in the constant field.

Then click the selection icon to copy the value in the expression editor.

Now repeat the same steps to add an OR logic to add the “proposed solution” status. Your equation should then look like:

Save your work and leave the transaction.

Putting it all together

We have a message and we change the status from “in process” to “Author action”.

If I check my email inbox, I have an incoming message.

Notice that the service desk number appears in my message.
The details of the request are sent as an pdf attachment. Again note that the service desk number and title come through nicely in the message.

If you do not want to send messages as attachment files, you can send them as text. You can control this in transaction SCOT.

We’ll switch to text and see what happens when the status becomes “proposed solution”.
This time you see that the text of the message is the body of the email.

There you go – emails made easy in SAP Solution Manager (or CRM)

Recommended additional reading:
Sending E-Mail from Support Message on SDN by Dolores Correa

I will first recap elements that I have setup in my system (that you can also find in the afore mentioned SAP document) and add the elements that I find are missing.
As usual, I encourage you to do test this in a test system before rolling it out to your productive clients.

Master data checks and setups

Check your business partner(s)

The service desk messages created in your system will use several partner functions, one of which is the sold-to party – these are your customers. So first check and make sure that your customers have the ‘sold-to party’ partner functions active. To check this, go to transaction BP and search for the organizational object “organizations”.

Double click on your selected business partner to navigate to its record and drop down the list of partner functions.

If you do not see the partner function “sold-to party” (in display mode) , then you need to go and create that partner function for your customer.

Check your IBASE settings

When your customer creates a service desk message, one of the key elements that he will add to his message is the IBASE for which he is reporting the service request. The IBASE (Installed BASE) in this context is a concatenation of characters that identify the system ID + the installation number + the client number. You need to make sure that your customers’ IBASE have been assigned to the correct “sold-to party” business partner. That way, when a message is created the sold to party will automatically be attached to the service request.
To check this, go to transaction IB52 and display your IBASE (usually 1 in the standard system). As you see in my example below, there are multiple SAP clients within one system. I could have the same sold-to party for all clients or individual ones for each one. Business partners can be assigned locally to each client or once for all clients.

I will add the sold-to party once for all clients. To do so, I select my entire system node and select the menu path Goto / partner.

In the next window I indicate the business partner number that corresponds to my customer.

Save your entry.

Check your organizational model

Your organization (sales and service departments) have to be mapped in SAP Solution Manager using transaction PPOMA_CRM. Each organizational structure is super specific to every company, but you can if you want use the one that comes shipped with Solution Manager. Use the SAP guide “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers” to help you set it up if needed. In the case of this example, I have adapted the one shipped by SAP to my context – SAP uses country DE, but I and my customers are in country AU – I have therefore used that country.

Set up your product hierarchy

Whether you understand the benefits of this step or not it does not matter, this is simply something that you have to do. The hierarchy could potentially be copied from your SAP ERP system if it existed there or you can maintain it locally in your SAP Solution Manager system. The hierarchy essentially helps you structure and segregate your products – for example you may wish to differentiate service products from say educational products, on site from off site service, internal services from external services. If you want to get this step over and done with just to get SLA’s calculated in your system, then again, just follow the “SAP Solution Manager – Service Desk for Service Providers” guide.
Below are snap shots of how I set up the hierarchy in my system. The hierarchy maintenance transaction is COMM_HIERARCHY.

The following set types have been defined.

Define your support product(s)

The next step of the process is to setup a product – the one that we will include in the contract with the customer. I have created a simple product of type “service” called SUPPORT_DESK. The transaction to maintain products is COMPR01. Notice of the product is linked to the category of my hierarchy.

Add the item category group SRVP. We could add the service and response profiles here in the product, but we will add this information in our contract.

Assign it to the sales area Sales/01/01.

Save your product.

Customizing changes and setups

Adding your response and service profiles

The point of all this process is to be able to mirror SLA’s that I have with my customers, in my Solution Manager system. Doing so means that you have contractually agreed with your customers that you will respond to all his service requests within a certain amount of time and that you will provide him with a solution – that resolves the issue – within a set timeframe. To add complexity to this, these time windows are more than likely to be variable depending on how critical the request is. Below are the times that I shall be using in my example.

Priority – - > Response time – - > Resolution time
1 – - > 1 Hour – - > 4 Hours
2 – - > 4 Hours – - > 2 Days
3 – - > 8 Hours – - > 4 Days
4 – - > 16 Hours – - > 8 Days

To set these parameters up in the system, use transaction CRMD_SERV_SLA.
You first need to setup a service profile. The service profile essentially dictates the hours during which your service desk operates.
Click the clock icon to maintain your “open for business” hours.

The service desk is open Monday to Friday from 08:30 to 17:30. Also, notice that the indicated time zone is UTC + 00.
I found that by using my actual time zone which is AUSVIC (UTC + 9), the SLA calculated times were during non business hours (eg 2am). Setting the time zone to UTC+00 has fixed my issues – so I assume that SAP automatically makes that time zone transformation.

The next thing we need to add, is the response and resolution times. I have chosen to only use the priorities of the service requests. I.e for each priority I shall indicate the response and resolution times.

For each priority I have maintained the SRV_RF_DURA (Duration Until first reaction) and SRV_RR_DURA (Duration until service end).

Check the SLFN message settings

I am of course assuming that you are using the standard SLFN service desk message. You need to make a couple of adjustments to it. Go into customizing to SAP solution manager / Configuration / Scenario specific settings / Service Desk / service Desk / General settings / Define transaction types.
If the below settings are not yet made, do them. Essentially we need to indicate how the contract selection will occur and also the how the sales and service entities will be determined in your service message.

Add your product to the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT

Remember that your contract will only be selected if certain elements that can be found in both the contract and the service request are identical. The service product is one of those elements. We will therefore customise the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT to add our service product to inbound service requests.
To do so go to transaction SPPFCADM. Pick the application CRM_ORDER and click the button as shown below (Define action profile and actions).

Assuming you are using the SLFN message for the VAR service desk process, you need to change the action definition AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT that is in the profile AI_SDK_STANDARD.

Select the line AI_SDK_ADD_PRODUCT and double click on processing types.

Switch to change mode and click the change icon as shown.

In the next window that pops up, click the create icon.

Create the container element with the following parameters. Translated, this will add the order product to the business transaction (the SLFN message) at the item level.

Finally and this is very important, you have to indicate the product that you want to add to the SLFN service message. Indicate the product code you created earlier.

Validate your entry and you will now see that the container editor looks something like below.

Save your work and leave the transaction – we can now go and create our contract!

Putting it all together

Create the service contract

Go to transaction CRMD_ORDER and create a transaction of type SLFV – service desk contract. Indicate your business partners and indicate the product you created earlier as well as a quantity (in my case I have indicated 1000 hours).

At this stage you can click on the ‘Organization” tab of your service contract and see that sales and services organizations have been determined – you can also click the “log” icon to see how those entities were determined or not!).

We now need to indicate the IBASE/systems for which this contract can be selected. In your contract item, indicate the system for which this contract can be selected. In my example, this contract can only be selected for two SAP clients that exist in the same system.

Remember that we also went to the trouble of adding response and resolution profiles earlier? Let’s use them. Go to the item data of your service product and in the service data tab, add your profiles.

Lastly we need to release the contract otherwise it is of no use – you need to do this for the header and item level. Go to your contract header – status tab and change the status to Released. Do the same thing at the item level.

Save your contract – you’re done.

Setting up a working layout

This step is optional – it is just going to make you work easier. All the fields that will be populated via this process appear in transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR in green.

To fully test your work, you will probably create multiple messages and quite possibly go into this transaction multiple times. As it can be a bit annoying to change the layout every time you use this transaction during the testing phase, I created a layout variant called GREEN_SCREEN that only shows the columns that could be populated via this SLA calculation process.
So let’s go and try to create some service desk messages. I’ll create three messages with three different priorities to see how the dates are calculated.

If I now switch to Solution Manager and call up transaction CRM_DNO_MONITOR with my screen layout I get the following.
You can see that system now calculates my initial response and completion dates/times based on my agreed SLA’s.

So there you – more to follow soon.

Disclaimer – I make no guarantees nor do I take any responsibility for you replicating these actions in your system.

According to Wikipedia, “Rich Internet Applications are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines”. I don’t think that this definition does do it any justice – I think that RIA’s are:

• Applications that offer a visually rich and engaging user interface
• Applications that offer content richness and useful and diverse functionalities

In other words it has to deliver functionality and it has to do so in an engaging UI – the argument being that such applications will deliver a greater employee productivity and/or customer loyalty. I would certainly vouch for that – go see a demo of SAP Business Explorer to see what I mean (you can even
upload your own data and play around with that).

As a continuation to my experiments in marrying technologies such as Php, Pear & Ajax to query a SAP database and expose the data to a user in a visually appealing form, it seemed only fitting that I would give this RIA thing a shot too. You only need to google terms such as “SAP FLEX” to see that there is
a wealth of information out there on that topic showcasing these two platforms with plenty of whoa factor. Being from a logistics background I thought it would be appropriate to use logistics functions in my examples.

So in this post I’ll be looking at the following scenarios:

• A sales application using SAP, Flex and Php (http service call method)
• A production order application using SAP, Flex and Php (http service call method)
• A sample sales application using SAP and Flex (web service call method)

The tools of choice for my experiments today are:

• Adobe Flex (which is built on top of Eclipse – the same tool used to build the SAP Developer Studio). Adobe is very generously offering you the chance to download a try-before-you-buy fully functional demo version for 60 days (if you have already have Eclipse or SAP developer Studio you may elect to download the plug-in instead – although I have not tried that).
• Easyphp which is a nice WAMP (Windows Apache Mysql Php) package that I have been using for years – php in version 5.2.8
• The SAPrfc extension module for Php
• Of course SAP. The SAP backend system I’ll be using is a SAP ECC 6.0 system.

In the first two scenarios, I’ll be using php as the go between Flex and SAP.

Essentially the Flex application will call an http service that is a php script to which we’ll be posting some variables. Php will then wrap those variables in an RF call to the SAP backend system. Assuming all goes well, SAP will send a response that needs to be formatted in a xml like structure so that that it can be properly interpreted by the Flex application – again php will take care of that.

[code lang="php"]
echo "\n";
for($i=1; $i<=$ADDRESSDATA ; $i++){
$DATA = saprfc_table_read ($fce,"ADDRESSDATA",$i);
echo "\n" . $DATA["CUSTOMER"] . "\n";
echo "" . $DATA["STREET"] . "\n";
echo "" . $DATA["COUNTRY"] . "\n";
echo "" . $DATA["CITY"] . "\n";
echo "" . $DATA["NAME"] . "\n\n";
}
echo "";
[/code]

will yield an xml response to the Flex application as below,

[code lang="xml"]


0000100000
800 Gardiner Street
AU
Darwin
Customer domestic 00


[/code]

and in the Flex script below, on lines 5 and 6, you can see how I’ll be retrieving the customer number (CUSTNUMB) and customer name (CUSTNAME) in my Flex datagrid.

[code lang="xml"]
width="368" height="119" y="10" x="10" id="dg1"
change="dgChangeHandler()" dropShadowEnabled="true">





[/code]

So, without further adue, below are explanations and swf animations for each process.

A simple sales order application

This application uses multiple http service calls and its key elements are:

• An http service calling BAPI_CUSTOMER_GETLIST is used to populate one datagrid
• An http service calling BAPI_MATERIAL_GETLIST is used to populate another datagrid. The product pictures are stored locally on the web server, and the picture filename corresponds to the material number in SAP (eg if the material is called Y126, we have a picture file called Y126.jpg)
• The user will then pick the customer expected delivery date, the required quantity and indicate a selling price
• The Order button will then post the data to another http service in order to create the sales order (by calling the FM CREATE_SD_ORDERDAT1) in SAP. If all goes well a response with the sales order number will be issued to the user.

* Note that some values have been hard-coded in the php files (but they could just as well have come from posted variables). Also, the user will be required to type in his SAP credentials (the SAP server information has been hardcoded in the php file, but we are passing the SAP username and password to the script).

Here is a swf example of this application.

A simple production order application

This application uses multiple http service calls and its key elements are:

• There are two tabs in this application. One tab will show the data in a tabular form whilst the other tab is geared toward delivering the information graphically.
• An initial http service calling BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST is used to populate a datagrid containing production order header details. The response provided by SAP is first interpreted and transformed into xml by Php.
• The same http service above will not only deliver production order header data, but also aggregated data that will be used to drive some of the charts in the graphical dashboards. All this data is delivered in one xml formatted stream.
• Whenever a line is selected in the production order header datagrid, it will trigger for another service call to be executed and this time call BAPI_PRODORD_GET_DETAIL in order to retrieve the production order component and operation details.

Here is a swf example of this application.

A very simple production order header report

In this last example, similar to the one above we will consume a web service calling BAPI_PRODORD_GET_LIST and populate the retrieved data in a Flex datagrid – nothing more here – if just to show another method to get the production order header information.

The corresponding Flex Project can be downloaded here. Remember to change your server name and port before using it.

Here is a swf example of this application.

Recommended readings

Rich Internet Application Development on SDN

PHP Development on SDN

Engaging User Interfaces with Adobe Flex
Consuming ABAP Web Services using Flex a hands-on tutorial given by Matthias Zeller, Ed Herrmann, and Dan McWeeney

I hope you find these examples interesting and if you do find them useful and if there is anything you’d like to share, then please do leave a comment.