using calculated field for vendor number

[Former Member]

Scenario: Create an incremental id for vendors flowing in through import server. Some set of vendors will have their id entered through portal.

using a calculated field could have been a solution, but import maps do not support calculated field. what are my options?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Subin,

Requirement is not clear,please elaborate.

Thanks,

Ravi

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

requirement to have vendor number generated in mdm with various number ranges to be supported. let say one set of vendor number range will be 1000 - 9999, that should be auto incremented in mdm when they are loaded to mdm from legacy through import server.

But for different set of vendors which are entered through portal, vendor number should be entered manually in portal....and they are different number ranges from above

so we need to handle both these types of vendor numbers in the same field. Hope this explains.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Subin,

Vendor number generation will depend on Account group.

This is what happens in ECC-

When a vendor master record is created, a unique number identifying the master record is assigned. The number comes from the number range provided for the account group.

Internal number assignment

Here the SAP R/3 System automatically assigns a consecutive number from the number range defined, irrespective of any number of account groups attached to which the number range has been assigned.

In MDM - When creation of Vendor records takes place in MDM the same process has to be simulated.

So in MDM you will have to set up a internal number generation of type Qualified number range for number generation depending on different Account Group.

Please follow the link for that:

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/40155eaa-6437-2e10-afbc-de54b3132...

Please have a look at workaround solution which really helps.

For other you can keep External Number definition.

Thanks,

Ravi

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Subin,

Your requirement is to setup different number range for various account groups in MDM.

Now it can be achieved in various ways:

First way is as explained by Ravi in the above post and is the simple one.

Second way is as follows:

• You can create new field called Import Id in your table.
• While importing records, you can enter Import Id as 1-n everytime.
• Since number ranges will already be there in ECC.
• You need to create one custom program in ECC which will accept the import source file and updates vendor numbers against each record and correspondingly increase current vendor number in ECC as well.
• Then you would require to import once again the vendor numbers corresponding to each Import Id and then clear Import ID from the system.
• This process is complex and lengthy though.

So it seems that first option is more viable to be implemented.

Kindly let us know your thoughts as well. Thank you.

Regards,

Ankush Bhardwaj

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Thanks Ravi, Ankush.

I believe options listed below will be more efficient:

Since MDM drives the number ranges and ECC is set up to accept external number ranges, we can create an assignment field in the MDM repository and increment it by 1 during import from legacy for certain account groups (based on defined rules in assignment operations)

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Subin,

I thought of using Auto ID field for tracking of vendor records but it is not feasible as autoID would get incremented by 1 for every record irrespective of account group.

My doubt here is that even if we create one field in MDM for storing vendor number, how can we increment it by one when it is not having any value at the time of creation? In my opinion, it is not possible to refer to the fields of other record than on which you are executing the assignment(is it possible?). So how are you actually planning to implement it? I could see the other option that before importing record, you could actually look into Data Manager and see the last vendor number and then maintain vendor numbers starting from next one in the import sheet and directly import. But this will also have problems in case more than one person is importing data at single point of time. Please let me know in case i am wrong. Thank you.

Regards,

Ankush Bhardwaj

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

we can use max operator + 1 on vendor number field in assignment expression. so on data import, workflow calls assignment.