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Newsletter
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I have been at several
implementations and the most common question in everyone’s mind is To
“Z” Or not To “Z”? There are several opinions on this
subject, though SAP recommends creating a new Configuration Object
starting with “Z”. Managers and configuration team members are of the
belief that creating “Z” objects is Unsacred and leads to modifying
SAP code. Or it looks like they are not using standard SAP. The same can
be said about User-Exits, but I will not dwell into that area. For the very common example, in
sales and distribution, when you have to decide on Standard Order Type,
the question is OR or ZOR? Many a times, the Team Lead plays the role of
the mediator to keep everyone happy by casting a vote. Guess what, the
majority wins. It is OR, to the disbelief of the few who have the other
choice. I am not proposing to always use a
“Z”, but it all depends on how best you want to make use of SAP 4.6
functionality. The functionality I am talking about is transaction
variants and screen variants. It is one of the areas not all clients make
use of. When there is a need to customize the
screen layout like Graying out certain fields in Order Entry, or have the
column sequence default in order types as a variant, you create screen
variants. You can create your own transaction variant and
assign it to this screen variant. This was the requirement at one of my clients: To improve order entry time over the phone for Customer service, the client wanted to gray out (display only) all fields in transaction VA01 except for Material and Quantity. This helped them to enter the order quickly by using the tab key on the keyboard. Blindly! So it was decided to create a
transaction code - ZA01. Well, all the members who voted against ZOR had
no problems this time! It was discovered at this time (far
end of the implementation phase) that for this transaction variant, ZA01
to work, you need to assign SAP standard variant NO_VARIANT to
Standard Order Type OR. This is done in Config settings. But this lead to the unforeseen problem! Not being able to assign user defined screen variant to Order Type OR anymore. If there was a ZOR order type to begin with, this problem could have been avoided.
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Author
Profile Sunil Kamath, Senior SAP SD/MM/WM Consultant with vast industry experience. Specializing in GATP and Product allocations. He can be reached at Kamath_sunil@yahoo.com.
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