September 20, 2022
September 20, 2022
PCC –Enhanced Tcode SARA for super-charged SAP Archiving
At Paschke Consulting, we like the phrase “an educated consumer is our best customer” because the more you understand SAP archiving, the more you see the value in our enhanced SAP functionality especially when it’s integrated directly into Tcode SARA.
What we’re going to do in today’s BLOG post is teach you how to create variants and run archiving in SAP standard Tcode, SARA, only this time it will be with PCC’s enhanced functionality integrated directly into the SARA transaction. To start the conversation, notice the two brand new functions on your ordinary SARA screen – these are what’s going to save you days and weeks of work!
If you’ve ever run SAP data archiving in any volume, you know there are two trouble spots: creating all the archiving variants and running all the jobs in the right order - both these tasks are tedious and error prone. In the past, if you wanted to “catch up” archive and run FI document archiving from 2000through 2018, for example, you could run 19 jobs by year but they will likely time out and not give you the reporting flexibility by period. It’s better to run by period consistently but then you have 228 variants (19 x 12) to create that must be identical except for the dates and the dates must be correct or you risk archiving duplicate data. If you have three regions, e.g., US, EU, and SA, then you have 684 variants (228 x 3). Then you also have to run 684 jobs in the right order! This is easily days/weeks of work creating variants and weeks/months work running jobs.
Instead with PCC’s Enhanced SARA, you can create the variants and schedule the jobs in minutes.
All the steps for this will take place in Tcode SARA, so let’s get started.
All the prior functions will always exist but we’ve added Mass Variant creation and Mass Write Job scheduling to automate the repetitive manual steps.
Our steps for this process will be:
1) Create Template variants (one for each region)
2) Use PCC Mass Variants function to create a batch of variants based on that template in step 1 for use in Step 3
a. Spot check several of the created variants in this batch to ensure accuracy of dates and other fields
3) Use PCC Mass Write Job to schedule the execution of all the jobs for all the variants created in Step 2
a. Monitor the scheduled jobs and the Scheduler Job in SM37
4) Go get coffee, relax, and perform other more important, value-add functions!
From the standard Write function in Tcode SARA, create the Template variant (see details below).
The template variants must contain all the criteria for each group or region that you’ll be processing. In this example, it’s the list of Company Codes. You can also add any other criteria on the selection screen that you like.
Each template variant, must have a Fiscal Year, Period, and/or Date populated in order for the Mass copy routine to correctly populate the dates in the batch of variants.
The templates must be prefixed with “PCC_TEMPLT_” followed by the name or identifier of the group. Click save to save the template variant.
When you click on the above PCC Mass Variants function key, the below screen is displayed. You can populate the fields as below, for example.
Enter your Template Variant, created in Step 1, in the Template Variant field.
Enter the range of Years for which you want to create variants.
Enter a Batch Identifier that will group the 228 variants into a single batch; the batch identifier will then be used in Step 3 to run all the jobs in an automated fashion.
Click the “execute” icon and you’ll receive a message indicating how many variants were just created:
Below is an example of the created variants with the information populated. Note that all the fields are identical to the TEMPLATE variant we created in Step 1 except for the Year and Period fields in the selection criteria as well as the Session Note field.
Click on the PCC Mass Write Job function key. The system will present the below screen with the most recently transacted-upon Template variant and other suggested information.
In our case, all the information is correct, so we can simply click “execute” or “Schedule Archiving Jobs” and the Archive-Write-Scheduler job will be submitted (see below) which will run the jobs according to the configured information.
This information dialog is displayed. Click the green check.
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