ALE olé

Have you ever tried to do something in a Test or Dev system that you just did on Prod and it won’t work? …. GL is missing. It's even more interesting when it's the other way around, something that succeeded in the Test does not work in production.

SAP has a sophisticated and fairly rigid system for transferring changes on the customization side, but at least in finance there is often a close connection between the master data and the application, one would expect that the system will have a solution in that area as well, and as we know it SAP has indeed a solution (or a few) for most common challenges.

Since I know the system (I will not reveal too many details but it was another millennium) there has been a few possibilities to transfer MD. In the beginning we used to transfer COA by CR with some hacks that allowed the company code data to go along, in some cases we used good old LSMW for special missions and some even wrote ABAP for that. Latter we used for ongoing projects the upload and download transaction (AKA: FS15 and FS16). All this methods are OK for a project or ongoing small landscape, it is a much more interesting challenge when you have 5 or more systems in your landscape or if you have some other SAP systems, for other companies in the group or for specific use of non back-office processes.

This is when you have to go to ALE. Not proposing you should avoid ALE in more simple scenarios, but when it gets complex you really need it.

We have been using the basic MD transfer ALE functionality for many years now and it is quite straightforward, as with all SAP special functions it is simple if you are looking for the basic features and you know what you are doing, but the tools is very powerful and you can achieve about anything you will need in the area of MD transfer including: automatic or scheduled triggering, data alterations, one to many routes, workflow and more.

To sum things up, I think in an SAP environment you will be wasting the system capabilities if you do not set up ale MD transfer for your main dynamic MD objects.

So do not say “SAP enjoy” but “ALE deploy”.