SAP S/4HANA for EHS-IM - Search for user retrieves username with an extra "D" letter

[Paulo_Pinto]

When trying to allocate “responsible person” to a Location, Task, or changing an Investigation Lead in an incident, the system is adding and extra “D” before the username in some users, retrieving the message that the user does not exist. This behavior is seemingly happening with random users.

Below I'm posting one of such cases - I blanked some info for privacy reasons.

In the "Select: Name" search box (3rd image), the blanked users are being retrieved correctly, with their name and BP number between brackets, but for others my customer's system is retrieving the SAP username with an initial "D" appended to it! As such the system doesn't recognize it, generating the error message "DUSERNAME does not exist".

All users are similarly and (apparently) correctly created. This behavior started mid-december and affects users in an apparent random way, regardless the time of user creation, plant they belong to, etc. 

Additional (I hope useful) information: this customer is in the first stages of implementing Success Factors but is still using the "old" HCM solution.

Has anyone seen this happen before?

Thanks in advance for your time

 

[michaelf_]

Dear Paulo,

the reason for this extra letter "D" in the username is used by EHS internally to handle different types of natural or legal persons. Whenever we store information about a person or organization, there are different objects which are used to represent this persons and/or organizations:

• HR Persons (from HCM, see t-code PA20). For any of these, we add the letter "A" internally. As an example, an employee might have the number 2901, which will get stored internally in EHS as A00002901.
• Applicants (from HCM). For any of these, we add the letter "B" internally.
• External Parties (Business Partners), used for both, persons and organizations, we add the letter "C" internally. 
• System Users (see t-code SU01D). For any of these, we add the letter "D" internally. If a user is picked as a responsible person at a location level with the "normal" username MFECKER, it's internally stored as DMFECKER.

Of course, these different objects can be connected, e.g. connecting the HR Person by infotype 0105/0001 with the system user. In such a case, we internally choose the most "useful" representation. Assuming you have a HR Person connected to a System User, it's obviously the HR Person. For an S/4HANA business user (which is the connected HR Person, System User, and Business Partner), it's the HR Person representation with some tweaks.

With this generic approach, we can store different kinds/types of people or organizations in a single field. Of course, in some places, we MUST look for a user - especially if there is a workflow in the system involved. This is the case for the "Responsible Persons" at a location level. These are used to be the responsible persons for the workflows for EHS Incident Management, EHS Chemical Data Management, and EHS Environment Management.

The issue with the error message "DUsername does not exist" is usually caused by a system copy. As an example, on a production system, there might be users which do not exist on a development box. After the system copy the users might get deleted on the copied instance, causing the problem.

In your search for responsible persons, the DUsernames should not show up - if these are not existing. First, I would ask you to check if the business users are correctly set up. Then, you might raise a support ticket to SAP.

With kind regards,

Michael

[Paulo_Pinto]

Good morning @michaelf_ 

Thank you for your answer, with so much important information on how this solution works. This is pointing me in the right direction to look for a solution.

Kind regards

Paulo Pinto