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Strange behavior deletion of preqs in R3 from APO

Former Member
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Hello all

I was wondering if anyone has ever seen anything like this.

We have externally procured materials (bought from a vendor outside the company) in APO. We enter a forecast(PIR) in R3 and CIF this to APO. Then we run planning in APO which generates purchase requisitions that are then sent to R3 via CIF.

Now, once per day we replan all of these materials via batch heuristic. Also the materials are set to automatic planning in the planning procedure (meaning when there are changes on the material planning will execute. Both of these actions may lead to deletion and recreation of purchase reqs since the requirements may have changed.

What we are seeing is that at times the already existing purchase requisitions in R3 do not get deleted although they're removed OK in APO.

At the same time newly created preqs in APO arrive fine in R3, this is the same if you try to make a preq manually and then remove it by hand in APO.

The integration seems to work fine if you test it, so there does not seem to be any master data or general interface issues.

However, over time, the preqs in R3 do not get removed as i wrote, and this leads to preqs building up in R3 compared to APO.

We can work around this by running the reconciliation report on the material and transfer the missing preqs to APO, then if we afterwards run planning to clean up the excess the preqs in R3 do in fact get deleted.

So my question is. What on earth could cause APO to "lose control" of purchase requisitions in R3? It does not happen for all of our materials, but it seems to happen regularly and we have to constantly do this cleanup in order to keep the problem in check.

Any ideas?

Regards

Simon Pedersen

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Answers (3)

Answers (3)

Former Member
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Hi Simon,

What is the Sequence of the Batch job you are running? Are these confirmed PREQs or stock transport requisitions?

Sometimes, the change pointers are created as "R" but does not get deleted in ECC. or run RLCDELETE ( do not run this). but if you could let me know the job sequence , then we may be able to figure out.

we have created a Z program to delete these preqs from pulling out the data from APO while reconciling.

Regards,

Rorie

Former Member
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Both. We've seen the issue both on preqs placed against an external vendor and with stock transfer preqs (which are confirmed).

How can I investigate the change pointer issue you mention? Can i see it in a table somewhere?

Former Member
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Just after your netchange  or Deployment is run and before C5, go to /sapapo/c5 transaction and give that part# and see if you have change points with method "C" and "R".

The PREQs which are not getting deleted is only because you need to set up the jobs in the right sequence. or create a Z program for deletion of PREQS which is only in ECC.

hubert_spohn
Active Participant
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Hi Simon,

you always can get inconsistencies when two or more people (or jobs) ar working on the same data.

Maybe a user is working on the data while the plannign run is scheduled.

Regards.

Hubert

Former Member
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This is something we're looking into also. The plant being replanned also runs CTP for all of the materials. So it is indeed likely that a material could be CTP planned during the planning run, generally this happens when a user ATP checks an SD order.

But, since our systems are used globally (Americas-Europe-Asia) there is really no time slot where we can't potentially get CTP executing.

sourabh_jain66
Active Contributor
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Hi Simon,

Did you checked APO outbound queue, if they are getting transferred correctly.

Also if you have CIF error handeling activated, check there if you gets some hint on this.

It might happen, that queue are not able to be transferred from APO to ECC for PREQ deletion.

Do let me know if you find anything there.

Rgds

Sourabh

Former Member
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Yes, we have monitored the cif queue, nothing shows up there. We don't have cif error handling turned on in our systems so i'm afraid it wont help us much 😕

We've tried monitoring the system over time, and the problem seems to occur when one of our big plants are planned in batch.

This planning run replans _all_ materials by deleting and recreating all of the existing preqs. It appears that some of the preqs deleted never get removed in R3 when this is done.

I don't know if the volume of data could cause this, it seems so, we replan something like 50.000 materials every night and it means quote a few preqs sent through the CIF.

sourabh_jain66
Active Contributor
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Hi Simon,

Did you take this issue up with SAP, this might be the issue with data volume.

Also have you implemented any exit / BADI etc. in your system, which might be creating issue.

Rgds

Sourabh

Former Member
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I've reported it to SAP. They won't really get involved unless we can show them a reproducable example. And we currently don't have a way to do that.

This process runs totally standard, no changes or badis. The only strange thing might be that we run an old APO 4.1 install on old hardware. We will be upgrading this to 7.02 with new hardware too in a few months so perhaps that will help.