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New upload function in MM17 and MASS transaction

November 21, 2014 | 22,417 Views |

Jürgen L
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MM (Materials Management)
ehp6 | import | importing connections | mass | mass changes | materials management | mm17

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Man is creature of habit.

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Although we have upgraded to EHP 6 quite some time ago I just discovered a new option in MM17
Mass changes transaction for material masters.

I saw the buttons earlier, wondered, but did not look into it. Today I tried, and it certainly saves me quite
some time in future.

Nathan Genez wrote recently his blog Why it’s time to move on from LSMW and mentioned that some
application specific tools like mass maintenance are more suitable than our all-purpose-weapon

And this new function in MM17 is certainly a big step forward and makes it easier to waive once more
the LSMW recording and its many steps until you are done.

I really wish SAP would point us more direct to new features like in some other websites when you get
there after a change, with a little animation “have you seen this new button? Want to learn more?” . But
not even the menu Help > Application help got me to something related.

Now let me show the steps of the new feature.

Starting point was an email Friday afternoon 4:30 PM: Can you upload the attached file until Monday, we
reorganized the warehouse and need this for our scheduled inventory.

As you see, my users are already drilled to send well prepared data, only this way they can get
something on short notice

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Start the engine: MM17. You can see the new buttons right on top. Hard to ignore, but …. Leave me a
comment if you already tried it before you read this.

Select the table for the data change. In this example it is table MARD with the storage location data of a
material.

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click the Import data from File button to get the file browser to select your source file.

Important: you can directly choose an Excel file. I did it with a xlsx extension. Much more convenient
than LSMW where you have to convert your Excel first into a text file.

After you selected your file and clicked open in the browser you come back to MM17 and see a pop-up
screen to define the Upload Parameters.

Check and set the decimal format and the other fields according to its appearance in your Excel. Was
not really important in my case as I had neither value fields nor date and time fields to change, just a text
field. So I could concentrate on the fact if my data is with a header line or without.

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As you see in source my first line has the field names, hence I switched the radio button to “with header
line”.

SAP omits then this line from the data to be changed.

Execute it after you are done with the settings

Next surprise: One click on the assignment button and SAP was able to assign the columns from my
Excel automatically to the fields of table MARD.

This is based on the field names used as header in the Excel file.

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As you can see in the next picture, 3 fields have this spreadsheet icon with a green traffic light. Here
was the auto mapping ok, the gray diamond means it could not automatically assign the source field.

No problem with this new feature. Just click this button with the gray diamond and you get all fields of
table MARD and you can manually assign the field of your choice. Highlight it and then click the green
enter button.

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Now you can see that the gray column turned green. Fantastic – continue with execution.

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Now you see the old well known MM17 screen, everything is pre-selected and you could directly start.
But first see this interesting information at the bottom of the screen: SAP identified that one record in my
Excel file has no record in table MARD. So you immediately know about records that will not be
processed.

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That’s all. Just finish your work by clicking the SAVE button and SAP will update your records as usual.
And since I only got success messages I can waive this screenshot.

The saved time between doing it this way compared to the LSMW way was used to write this document.

Have fun.

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90 Comments
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Former Member

November 30, 2017 at 3:00 pm

I cannot set the values in fields (eg. MARC-BSTFE, MARC-EISBE) to zero or blank using this method.

any idea why?

I just want to delete the entry safety stock field and set it to blank/zero.

If there is another value instead instead of zero or blank. it is updated.

but if zero / blank is there.. the old value is not over written.

Only way i know to set zero / blank value is by the usual method with new value from top.

but through excel it doesnt work. it becomes a difficult task if i have a list with mixed values.. some blanks and some value.

what am i doing wrong?

Jürgen L Post author

November 30, 2017 at 3:07 pm

See the 3rd screenshot, in the lower part is a field called “initialization indicator”

This character has to be in the column of the field which you want to reset to zero or initial.

Former Member

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December 7, 2017 at 3:14 pm

This was very helpful.

thanks alot for this Jürgen!

Former Member

December 13, 2017 at 10:12 am

Hi.

Great post! Thanks for this.

But I have a question: do anybody has experience with the background processing in combination with this excel upload? For
me, it only works if I process it immediately. But if I create a variant and want to process it in background (because of larger
amount of material numbers, ca. 2.500), I get error message “No data meet the selection criteria” (M& 107) – probably because
the uploaded “new” values where used as selection criteria?

(I have same problem, if I enter all data manually (no excel upload), and enter different values for each material number.
Background processing only works, if I put same value for every material number (copy from top). Do I do something wrong, or
is this function not provided?)

Thanks in advance, Daniela.

Jürgen L Post author

December 13, 2017 at 10:29 am

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Can it be that you have more than 999 entries in Excel? This was a limitation for background processing, see OSS
note 1778550 – Article Mass Maintenance: Parallel and Asynchronous Save

Former Member

December 13, 2017 at 11:07 am

No, I tested with just 5 material numbers, and tried to change field MARC-WEBAZ (with different
values for each material).

Jürgen L Post author

December 13, 2017 at 11:29 am

I just tested an ran into the same issue – the note search from the error message did not
retrieve any result.

You should eventually report it to SAP Support

Former Member

December 13, 2017 at 11:38 am

Ok, thank you for your fast replies.

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Jon Vaughan

January 9, 2018 at 4:38 am

You won’t be able to run it in the background as the excel read ( probably
from your local drive ) is foreground only …

Joseph DeMoya

December 26, 2017 at 10:15 pm

Hello Jurgen,

How do you create that additional record that SAP termed Non-Existent? our requirement is to create these records via upload
if possible. For example maintaining site specific article status records that do not exist just yet. Please know that it is possible
to create them individually using transaction MM42 but this would take some effort therefore our requirement to upload them.

Thanks for your help in advance.

Jürgen L Post author

January 12, 2018 at 9:23 pm

This described upload function is only designed for mass changes but not for creation, however creation still can
be done with the old well known MM17 functions

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Former Member

December 27, 2017 at 5:10 am

In the first screen shot you showed the excel format.Could you tell me how you download the format of Excel to import.It will be
very helpful to add my required fields.

Jürgen L Post author

January 12, 2018 at 9:20 pm

In this case it was probably a download from table MARD via SE16N which was then manually changed in Excel

Former Member

March 13, 2018 at 7:31 pm

Hi Jurgen,

Thank you very much for this document, it is really helpful. How can we run this in the background? i.e After importing all your
data from the spreadsheet can we execute the transaction in background?

Thanks

Raj

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Jürgen L Post author

March 13, 2018 at 10:54 pm

this was discussed recently just a little up in the comments

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