How to enable batch field for input in old sales orders after batch management turn on in material master?

[Former Member]

Hi,

We turned on the batch management flag in material master. Now we still have some old sales order created when that material was not batch managed. Only for those old sales orders, batch field is not open for input. SAP keeps a flag in sales order item VBAP-XCHPF for batch managed materials and this field is empty in all old sales orders in VBAP. Is there any way we can use these orders again? Can we populate this field in sales order item with X by using any standard functionality?

Thank you...

[sez41]

Asif,

DId you try by entering into one of those sales orders, changing a dummy field's value in item level, save and then check if vbap-charg is open for input? Please check this.

If this doesn't work, and you still want to use these sales orders, I guess the only possible solution is to write a simple program which will basically modify the batch relevance field you've mentioned in relevant sales orders.

[JL23]

If it is so simple then SAP could just provide a correction report instead of asking the user to close all existing documents when the match management indicator is changed in a material master.

And of course they do not want that you reopen those orders and continue using them as it may cause inconsistencies.

Actually SAP has a report for activation of batch management despite of open documents and probably taking care of those open documents, but it costs money, see OSS note 533276 - Setting the batch management requirement

[sez41]

Jürgen,

As this is related to a master data change after creation of a document, it's only fitting that SAP would not consider this change in a document, but hey you should always give it a try. In some cases master data changes after creation of a document are detected after all (i.e. Output management).

About the note you've mentioned - gotta check it, but as I'm posting this from a smartphone, now is not the time. (Gotta say that I'm not surprised about the cost component of it)

[JL23]

As I did archiving for some years I had seen quite many results from such trials with direct table updates, some were even made from SAP folks during the R/2 R/3 upgrade.

We all know how diligent changes are tested (just see the number of OSS notes, certainly 10% of all issues posted in MM are caused by homemade program code) . You may test if you finally can create a delivery with batches, Yippie-Ka-Yeah, test successful, move on. Nobody is testing a data life-cycle till the final end.

It was a quite easy and a common solution to do direct table updates, but it was seen from auditors and management. Now we have about a full man-day administration until a table update gets approved, nobody is happy about that, no, me neither.

15 years ago we were the saviors, today we are the criminals, no access with SE16, no SQVI, display only access to production, scrambled data in the test systems, no debugging in production, no changing of values with the debugger not even in the test system, authority only for need to know areas. All the associated a bureaucracy is eating half of our time that was used to deliver solutions some years ago. We got ourselves into this situation with such avoidable updates.