Migration of Custom Fields for CPM Projects in SAP S/4HANA Cloud

[anandkapadia]

Introduction

For migrating your data into SAP S/4HANA Cloud, you can make use of the easily consumable SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit. As of now, it is the standard way of migrating data into your system. However, in the past, the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit did not provide the flexibility our customers needed. The migration templates which you downloaded from the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit were predefined and any types of changes to the template were strongly prohibited. Also, any feature requests for the data migration content had to be submitted as an improvement request via the Influencer Portal as described in SAP Note 2676589.

Well, the bad news is you are still not allowed to modify the structure of the template at all. So do not try to delete, rename or reorder anything within the XML file. For seeing how to work with the template, I strongly recommend you check out the blog on the Do's and Don'ts for Working with the XML Templates. Also if you want to request any new content for the Migration Cockpit, you are still bound to the process as mentioned previously.

But the good news is that with the 1811 release of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, the extensibility framework of SAP S/4HANA Cloud allows you to extend your migration template with custom fields*. In this blog, we will perform the relevant steps in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system to extend the CPM project migration template with a custom field. We will therefore consider a scenario in which the legacy system contained a field region for customer projects which we also want to migrate into our SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.

* Warning: Currently, this feature is supported for the migration objects mentioned in SAP Note 2726010!

Steps

For adding the custom field to the CPM project migration template, we need to perform the following steps:

1. Create the custom field


2. Download the updated migration template from the Migration Cockpit


3. Repeat 1. and 2. for additional custom fields

Create a custom field

A detailed explanation of how to create custom fields and what the different steps mean is well explained in the blog Key User Extensibility on SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Adding Custom Fields. We will therefore not make deep-dive into the logic of creating custom fields and its variations.

So firstly what we need to do is to create the custom field for the business context Engagement Project. Therefore, we will open the app Custom Fields and Logic from the Extensibility group.



Next, we need to create the custom field by clicking on the + button in the Custom Fields tab.



On clicking, we are opening the Field Properties window in which we specify the details of the custom field region. In here it is important that we select the correct business context which has to be Engagement Project.



Afterwards, we need to enable the custom field region for the UIs. Therefore, we will switch to the UIs and Reports tab. In our case, we will enable it for the "Create and Plan Customer Project". By clicking on the Enable Usage button, the Customer Project and Engagement Project report are automatically enabled as well. Ultimately, the custom field is saved and published.

Download updated migration template

After the custom field has been created, we can now verify that the migration template for CPM project has been updated automatically. Therefore, we open the SAP S/4HANA migration cockpit and create a migration project first. Then, we initialize the CPM projects migration object by clicking on it. We receive the warning that the migration object must be updated with the new custom fields.



Once the migration object is initialized, we can open the documentation of the migration object which contains the relevant information that not only the Engagement Project tab in the XML sheet but also the Work Package tab can be enhanced with custom fields.



When we now download the CPM project migration template, we see that the custom field is now available. In the tab Field List the custom field region is now displayed including the technical name.



In the tab Engagement Project, the custom field is now available with a brief documentation.

Conclusion

And that's as easy as that. Now we extended the CPM project migration template with a custom field which we can now use to migrate custom fields into the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.

Please leave a comment below if you have any further questions!