cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Redlining for Objects

former_member393433
Participant
0 Kudos

Gurus,

I would like to get an confirmation if we can use Redlining functionality for different objects. There is BADI available for Redlining for Objects.

Can I use the same BADI for having Redlining for Material Master and Documents.

Are there any concerns that I should worry about for these objects.

Kindly advice

Thanks & Regards

Jo

Accepted Solutions (0)

Answers (3)

Answers (3)

ulf_petzel
Advisor
Advisor
0 Kudos

Hi @Graeme Thom. The redlining discussed in this thread is independent of any viewer. It is not about viewable files redlining, but about data redlining.The viewer reference at the time was Visual Enterprise Viewer, as can be seen in the link as well (support of former RightHemisphere file formats).

Ulf.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Regarding material redlining, no there isn't. It is something I created an improvement request for but other SAP customers apparently didn't think it was required since my improvement request didn't get any subscribers. We ended up creating a custom implementation for it. A fair warning though, it will take a lot of effort. I have been working on the implementation (custom WDA in addition to enhancements to the standard WDA, FPM, ABAP, custom tables, configuration, etc.) on and off for 16 months now. The Redlining APIs (2 BAdIs, 1 WDA, couple of ABAP classes for the SP part of it) can be used with any custom objects in PLM. Based on my experience you shouldn't attempt to implement redlining for the standard object types. If you do, you will have to implement custom versions of all used standard APIs. I suppose you could also enhance the standard APIs. I want to also warn you that the standard PLM material master APIs do not support applying of changes based on the validity date from the change number so you will have to implement that as well (which I did using the planned changes API). At least one more restriction that you will run into is that planned changes (e.g. Change Documents) do not support Long Texts nor Classifications (a known restriction in SAP going back years and years), another custom implementation is required for that (custom table and background job for applying the changes on validity date). I plan to write a blog on my experience with material redlining when I have sufficient free time on my hands.

ulf_petzel
Advisor
Advisor
0 Kudos

Hi,

thanks for your additional comments Samuli :-).

Once you have the time to blog about this, I would recommend to do it in the Master Data Governance Community - I think it would be a great small usability enhancement to the change documents based approach in MDG for Material to visualize the pending changes differently.

Regards, Ulf.

ulf_petzel
Advisor
Advisor
0 Kudos

Hi Jo,

You need to distinguish between redlining of a BOM (which is a dedicated capability and probably the BADI you mention is the one related to this functionality), and redlining of other objects. There is no redlining capability for Material Masters. There is if course in the viewer a document redlining functionality to visually redline and annotate suggested changes to a drawing. This functionality is called "conversations":

http://help.sap.com/erp2005_ehp_07/helpdata/en/1f/0285bdfbe2493da50b121fe558df43/content.htm?framese...

What are you trying to achieve?

Regards, Ulf.

former_member393433
Participant
0 Kudos

Hi Ulf,

Thank you very much for the quick reply. My requirement is to know if we can have redlining capability for Material master.

Any advice if there is any work around or something like redlining for Material Masters.

I will look into the conversations for Documents.

Thanks once again

Jo

ulf_petzel
Advisor
Advisor
0 Kudos

Hi,

no, there is no redlining for Material Masters. BUT - you could e.g. extend the Engineering Record change items with your key fields in the Material Master you would like to highlight proposed changes for.  Or add text to the material master change item what is supposed to be changed. Of course for both these ideas you would need yourself to take care of updating the material master accordingly after approval.

Another possibility is to use SAP Master Data Governance for governing material master changes, including mass changes. Here, since you are using a staging area, as part of the process you can leverage the change documents in staging to show what is planned to be changed. See slide with screenshot attached.

This capability though needs to be licensed and is a separate functionality that can be enabled in SAP ERP or in a separate instance.

Haven't seen customers though yet up to now which wanted to redline a material master to be honest. Only the MDG for Material use case.

Ulf.

former_member393433
Participant
0 Kudos

Thank you Ulf for your Guidance.

Its really a good piece of information.

Thanks & Regards

Jo

graemethomgs
Explorer
0 Kudos

Hi Ulf

I realize this is an old post, I read the link above with interest, but I cannot seem to figure out which Viewer is being referenced, is this the ECL viewer of the visual enterprise viewer?