IBP Excel Add-in Case (Upper Lower) issue

[jez_lawson]

Dear Experts,

I have an issue in a planning view where attributes are being pulled into the Excel sheet in the wrong case, and then when attempting to post changes back to attributes an error is thrown due to mismatches. The problem happens when I have the same text in different cases in the tables. My examples are all customer details.

Example

Customer 001 Name: Big Sales

Customer 002 Name: BIG SALES

In the planning view records linked to Customer 001 show the customer name BIG SALES in the Excel sheet and if I update a key field I get the Reject Changes error (as I believe the look up must be case sensitive). The issue occurs on Countries and Cities as well tied to the customer and these are much more likely to exist in out source data with different case formatting.

We are looking at using the UPPER operand when pulling the customer data from our S4 system to force all the text to be capitalised, but really we should not need to.

Extra confusion comes from the fact that the issue is inconsistent. On one day the text will display as Big Sales, the following day BIG SALES and there is no obvious reason as to why. Additionally the text fields are not part of the keys of the master data tables, so they logically should not affect the key field updates (they are in the planning objects so must be a mismatch there, but not obvious why its even in play). If I drop the attribute from the screen the update works.

Any ideas welcome.

Thanks,

Jez

[rahulmohnot · Accepted solution]

Hi Jez,

The Upper case and Lower case matters in IBP, they are treated as 2 separate combinations in the backend. If the planning level contains description, country, city then all will have impact.

The best practice is to convert all of them to Upper case or Lower case in integration layer (CPI-DS), to keep the data model consistent.

-Rahul

[jez_lawson · Accepted solution]

Thanks Rahul, this is what we have done. The confusing thing was why the Excel add-in was being inconsistent in what it displayed. The associated master data and the field definition in the planning object would be consistent for the customer numbers associated text fields, either in upper case or mixed case, however when the planning object was displayed in a row on the screen it would sometimes be in a different case from the rows in IBP (although a case that did exist for that specific character string in a different customer). We tried multiple fixes and our consultant also reviewed and we could not understand the cause, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason behind when the Excel interface switched up the case, but we have gone to an all capitals set up now (using UPPER in the CPI-DS level) and we are currently testing it.

Thanks again for the reply,

Jez