Due to various reasons, users in the different departments in the companies may need to know newly created master data such as material, customer etc in the backend systems meaning R3 or ECC.(during the reporting period or a day ago from current day) One way to learn these newly created master data is to call the responsible person from master data creation and ask him/her this info and send you newly created master data info but calling every time this person may be painful. Instead of this painful way, the alternative is BW. Using BW you can build a report that informs users about newly created master data in the backend systems within a required period. This blog will tell you how to inform your users about newly created master data using BW.
Before all, you should enable your master data for reporting. In order to so, you can either go to the infoprovider tab in RSA1 select your infoarea, right click and select insert characteristics as data target as shown below or you can go to the infoobjects tab and find your characteristics which you want to enable reporting, double click and in the screen that appears go to the master data /texts tab and in the bottom part of the that page click on Characteristic is data target or InfoProvider check box as shown at the second image below.
After enabling master data for reporting you can determine your master data transfer approach from backend systems. You can make a full load every day or you can go with first initialization then continue with daily delta. When a daily master data reporting required it would be better to go with delta approach instead of loading full data everyday.
Now it comes to the building our report with Business Explorer. Here the key point is the characteristic that you want to have report on, should have created on attribute otherwise you can not build your report based on creation date. Characteristics such as material, customer which have this created on attribute meaning that you can built your report on this according to the created on time. You can also check for other characteristics that you want to enable reporting whether they contain created on attribute or not.It seems that usually newly created material master data info or customer are required.
Below can be seen designed version of our master data report. The report below is just illustrative and designed to inform users about created material a day ago.You can derive your own version accordingly or upon a request.
After building the report in Bex, it is time to deliver this report to the users regularly via email. Upon a request user would like to see the report in their mailbox every morning, once a week or once a month.In order to realize this requirement, you can use either Reporting Agent or Information Broadcasting to schedule and deliver your report to your users.You can easily deliver your reports with Reporting Agent or Information Broadcasting and users will be able to get newly created master data info with help of BW without any pain.
Below can be found relevant links about information broadcasting and reporting agent.
Information Broadcasting Part 1 – System Parameter Setting
Information Broadcasting Part 2 – System Settings
Information Broadcasting Part 3 – Scheduling the First Report
Hope this has been informative for you.
Bluesky
