It’s really sad to realize that it took me 15 years to learn this very simple technic to create Enterprise Structure in SAP. I used to work in international companies with huge business units, personnel areas, and personnel subareas lists. It was a nightmare to create a bunch of new enterprise structure objects like personnel areas or subareas. Hit that check button, wait a whole life, hit copy, die and recover and go through a dozen of silly SAP questions with useless confirmations. It is sad. Until now.
There is an undocumented feature to make our life much easier. It saves hours, literally. Basically, we need is to copy personnel areas with the same attributes, tax settings, work schedules, and etc. In my old life, I was doing this one by one what sounds crazy today in 21 century. There are two things I’ve found recently and I want to share one of these with you today.
So. We need to copy enterprise structure objects which are a different story from PPOME transaction where we cope organizational units. We’re about personnel areas and subareas which is a customizing and performed in SAP IMG.
I believe you remember this screen where we start to establish a company in SAP, like SAP architects define the global rules, i.e. business units, plants, purchasing companies and much more. In one bank we wrote a tricky LSMW project to do copy-paste human-like activity to copy couple hundred personnel areas because bank expanded its presence. It was a really bad solution but it worked in 2006th.
Create personnel area in SAP
Today we will save hours of routine work.
Settings to create personnel area in SAP
Yes, it’s a trivial settings window. Menu Settings -> Change.
Once we turn off runtime instructions, turn on background transport recording, logging, expert mode and disable interactive copy mode we’ll turn in a God mode. Literally. System copies objects in seconds. Read it again – SECONDS for hundred of tables. Hit copy – boom – done. No time for coffee.
But that is not all. It can even copy some application data. Scroll to Customizing/Application and there will be a trigger. Unfortunately, SAP doesn’t tell us what data is copied.
And the worst. I was really disappointed when I’d found this. Scroll settings to the right and you’ll see Multiple Selection. This setting makes it possible to do a mass copy in a one window. Not copy one by one, but do a real mass copy of SAP enterprise objects. Isn’t it great for some 10-20 objects?
Multiple copies of personnel areas in SAP
If I’d known this my 15 years ago I’d have been that rich today… And to make you completely happy, there is a functional module to perform any action in ABAP. BAPI_ECOP_ORG_UNITS. Even remotely. You can create a simple worksheet in MS Excel and set up all enterprise objects with several calls to this BAPI from Visual Basic in your spreadsheet.
Have not I told you MS Excel is the most powerful ERP in the world?
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