Dear friends of SAP TM,
Let’s assume you run a TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA in a sidecar scenario with SAP S/4HANA. When you replicate your master data into the TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA, the master data in the source system often has much more information than actually needed for SAP TM in the target system. Therefore, when replicating the master data, the somewhat ‘unnecessary’ data often requires additional settings and data in the target system which you obviously don’t want to maintain.
In the following, there’s a hint how to handle this regarding the replication of products.
Basically, a product in SAP S/4HANA can have a ridiculous amount of different data.
The multi-million dollar question is, which of those is actually relevant for SAP TM. Quite frankly…the answer is not given anywhere in this blog post. But it’s safe to say, that data from the following tables are required for SAP TM:
- MARA (General Material Data)
- MAKT (Material Descriptions)
- MARM (Units of Measure for Material)
On the other hand, data which you don’t require in SAP TM (except any rare or special cases) is for instance those from tables MARD (Storage Location Data for Material), MARC (Plant Data for Material) and many others.
Now, master data replication to an SAP S/4HANA system needs to be done by DRF (Data Replication Framework). What you really want to do is to replicate only the data actually required for SAP TM (at least for your scenarios). And to do so, DRF has so-called segment filters that can be used to transfer a subset of the data of a master data object.
In our example, we have a product in SAP S/4HANA which has plant / storage location data in table MARD that we don’t want to replicate:
If we would now replicate this product with DRF, its whole data is transferred to the TM embedded in SAP S/4HANA, creating an equivalent copy. With that, it might be, we receive errors that additional settings are needed in the target system.
Therefore, we use DRF with those segment filters (in transaction DRFOUT) by excluding any plant and any storage location:
As a result, data from table MARD hasn’t been transferred to the target system. You can check this in the target system on the database or see the following try to display the view ‘General Plant Data / Storage’ in transaction MM03:
The same can be done for other types of product specific data. I.e. the sales data (stored in table MVKE) can be eliminated from replication by excluding all sales organizations in the segment filter.
I hope this makes your life a bit easier when it comes to the replication of products in a sidecar scenario.
Feel free to share any comments, I appreciate!
Thanks to author Michael Haase
