Adding a New Characteristic to Planning Area

[Former Member]

Dear Friends,

I want to add a new characteristic to the existing CVCs in the Planning Area. I understand that adding a characteristic is a bigger process by way of deactivating the existing Planning area and reinitialization etc. Could anyone pls let me know the steps/procedure to be performed before I start working on this or if anyone has a detailed documentation on this it will be great. Would greatly appreciate your help. Thanks.

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

Hi,

1. Backup Planning area to a Cube.

a. Create datasource on the Planning area & based on this datasource create the rest (Infosource, Update rule etc..) to load to the Cube.

2. Delete time series from planning area.

3. Goto the PLOBS, deactivate

4. Add the new characteristics

5. Activate PLOBS

6. Create CVC from the backup cube

7. Create time series on the planning area.

8. Load the data using /SAPAPO/RTSINPUT_CUBE

/Shibu

Thanks for rewarding points if this is helpful.

[Former Member]

Hi Shibu,

Thanks for your reply. It is very useful though and have awarded points for you. Well I would like to continue further on the clarification that as you said load data using RTSINPUT_CUBE, if am right this is for loading the Key figure values to the Planning area?.

Actually I have to add characteristic as well as a Key figure which will store QTY against this. Now when I generate the CVCs, the combinations are created using the new characteristic that Im adding now and when I load the planning area with the data, what will the data be for the newly added key figure. Will it contain zero or how to load data for this?

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

RTSinput_cube is for loading data from infocube to Planning area. you can also access it by /SAPAPO/TSCUBE

If you have created a new KF and new characteristic there are a couple of ways to load data into it. Depends on what the Char/KF are and what you want to do with them. Do you know the source of this KF/Char and what it should contain?

1. make sure that the Infocube has data to load this. If you have a matching characterisitic and a matching KF you can load it - make sure you have the KF assignment and the Char assignment correct

2. If you dont have the KF in the Cube: You can fill the KF either with a macro or a TSCOPY from another KF.

The KF value for the new char you loaded can be a result of disaggregation. You need to set up the KF for that and make sure your proportional factor calculations are run (or you can set it to equal distribution)

[Former Member]

Hi,

Actually the Characteristic that Im planning to add newly is a new Master data called "splnumber" which contains some alpha numeric numbers and its datatye being "Char". In R/3 each product is associated with a "splnumber". This am going to set up a custom transaction to bring this Master data since I cannot bring to APO using CIF.

The question is that while I generate the CVCs, how does the Values of this new characteristic gets associated with relevant Products or actually am not clear with how the CVCs are generated using this new characteristic. Your answer will greatly help my understanding. Thanks.

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

So are you going to use this SPL number characterisitic for selection and interactive planning in dp?? or is it just to load as masterdata in product master for some other reason?

assuming it is the first reason, in scm 5 you can generate CVC out of a list or an infocube (or a BADi or another POS) check /SAPAPO/MC62

create a work list(.txt tab limited) based on the old CVC (you can download the list from the same transaction) and attach a column for the new char and populate it and load it back and generate CVCs

or

find out the infocube from which your current cvc is being generated. see if you can change this cube to have the spl number as a characteristic. you can try to populate this cube with the new char attached to the product

[Former Member]

Hi Harish,

The SPL Number is going to be part of Master Data which is to be attached with each Product vis-a-vis the CVCs. So if my understanding is correct and to recap the steps that I need to follow for introducing a New Char in the Planning Area is as below. Pls correct me if any of the steps are in different order which is very important,

1.Bring the new characteristic into the Master data in SCM-APO either through CIF or custom transaction

2.Create a back up cube

3.Create Infosource, Info objects, Update rules, Transfer / Communication structure

4.Backup Planning area to this back up Cube.

5.Delete time series from planning area.

6.Goto the PLOBS and deactivate

7.Add the new characteristic in the Planning Area

8.Activate PLOBS

9.Create an Excel file of the existing CVCs and include the new characteristic in a new column

10.Populate the values for the new characteristic in the CVCs in Excel file (How to populate values for this new characteristic? Any procedure is available?)

11.Generate CVCs from the worklist (excel file)

12.Create time series on the planning area

13.Load the data using /SAPAPO/TSCUBE to the Planning Area

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

Hai Bala,

9.Create an Excel file of the existing CVCs and include the new characteristic in a new column

10.Populate the values for the new characteristic in the CVCs in Excel file (How to populate values for this new characteristic? Any procedure is available?)

11.Generate CVCs from the worklist (excel file)

Your steps 1 through 8 are ok. Then when you add a new object and activate your Master Planning Object Structure(MPOS- I guess this is what u mean by PLOBS), this means, in the background, the system generates a APO cube with the characteristics listed in your MPOS and key figures in PA with the cube name same as the MPOS name.You can search for this cube in infosources with PLOBS name. If you cannot find it, then probably the generated objects are hidden Go to Extras> display generated objects. Then you can see that cube. This cube should have all the objects listed in MPOS.

For step 9 through 11, you donot create CVCs from excel file. You have 2 options, one to create all combinations manually or from a cube. You load the excel file to a cube and you give the cube as reference in MC62. The system goes into the cube and reads all the chars. and generates all possible combinations and stores then in the generated cube with MPOS name.

For more information read

<a href="http://help.sap.com/saphelp_apo/helpdata/en/36/8e813a6a85085be10000000a11402f/frameset.htm">Characteristic Value Combination</a>

The other steps are also ok.

Hope this helps.

Message was edited by:

Visu Venkat

[Former Member]

Hi Visu Venkat,

Thank you very much for your view points. I understand the process but still am not clear how to populate values for this new characteristic. Could you pls suggest steps for the same. Thanks.

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

hi visu

in scm 5.0 you can create cvc's directly out of worklist of .txt (tab delimited) file (or from a badi or from another POS). you can also edit the worklist directly on screen before generating the CVCs

you can also download into an local file the CVCs straight out of mc62

[Former Member]

Thanks Harish. I didn't know that. Thats amazing. By the way, what do you think would be the use of it? Its bypassing BW for atleast partially. Isn't it.

[Former Member]

i thought you said you already have a one to one mapping for product to splnumber

get the product to splnumber matching table from R3 and create a vlookup in excel for the downloaded cvctable and populate the splnumber characteristic, save it as a value and you have the new file to create your cvc

is that what you want?

[Former Member]

Hi Harish,

The one to one mapping of product to splnumber has to be created out of the CVCs that are going to be generated. What am planning is that to bring splnumber as part of master data and include this as new characteristic and activate the planning area. And then generate CVCs. But we have only SCM4.1 and not 5.0. So I cannot create CVCs out of an excel.

So after creating the CVCs from Planning area's cube, is there an alternate way of loading data into the new characteristic? or should I load data into this characteristic while it is in the cube and then generate the CVCs?

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

Hai Bala,

First of all correction! Data is loaded to Key figure not to characteristic. Are you asking about the data you see in interactive planning table or CVCs.

Let me put it this way: All CVCs are based on combinations of chars. and is Master data

Ther are no combinations for key figures. The data you load into these key figures is your transactional data.

For loading data into Key figure, you can use transaction TSCUBE or you can give the semantics as 002 and specify the cube name in your planning area> key figure details.

Please let me know if I answered your question. You seem to be in confusion with the concept. I recommend reading the MPOS, PA, loading concept and then everything would be clear.

Thanks.

[Former Member]

Hi Visu,

I understand that each CVC has a set of Key figures associated which holds the data. After generating the CVCs out of a cube actually I was asking about the KFs. I believe my question was messed up in my previous post. Am sorry about that.

Well, after I generate the CVCs when I want to load the KF values, there are two ways - one is load from Infocube and other through excel file. If am going to load through Infocube, how do I load the infocube with KF values? Secondly how does the disaggregation of values to different level happen here? Should I execute the Propoprtional factors job?.

Regards

Bala

[Former Member]

Hi Bala

If you cannot do the CVC generation from excel, do it the way Visu has said in one of the replies above - from a cube

would be a good idea to refer how POS and Planning area interact

Also you need to know what data needs to be populated or how it needs to be populated. you would have had this in mind when you decided to load this as a characteristic in the first place, isnt it?

Its easy to device a mechanism to populate it afer you know that

if you have data that you know needs to go into this characteristic combination, then load it into the cube and then into the planning area. thats the easiest way out. If you know the KF values yoou need to follow the Data loading process. (for eg load it from a .csv file)

there are some alternate ways of populating data - try the mapping of characteristics in Characteristic assignment in the TSCUBE transaction. again would be a good idea to play with this

you need to run proportional factors job to get the prop factors. But, typically, you need history to generate this. Do you have it?

to get the disaggregation to happen you shouldve set this KF to I, APODPDANT

you can also choose to have disaggregation calculation type set to prorata, S, for eg. or average , A- again all this will depend on

hope its not getting more confusing

[Former Member]

am not sure of the bypassing bit...

Dont think you needed a 3 dimensional cube to generate a 2 dimensional list of characterisitic combinations in the first place.

maintainance of CVCs- new, deleted has in my opinion been a pain and i suppose this is expected to take care of some issues

the worklist also lets you do online what you would have to do outside of the system earlier. it lets you check for duplicate entries, presence of wrong type, spl characters etc.

but you can also bypass the worklist and use it like earlier versions

[somnath_manna]

Hi Bala,

Suggest you post your question as a new post since this is becoming messay as you mentioned.

Thanks,

Somnath