I had partied hard last night and I was still dreaming. I could hear the track that was the best trance I had ever heard, but I can also feel the vibe or was it the vibration. It was not a dream anymore. It was my phone ringing & vibrating & flashing like disco lights. I read the caller. Now, the flashing was hurting my eyes. I was in two minds, and the evil one picked up the call. “Kunal.” “Good Morning Sir, Happy Ne…” “Kunal. There is an issue in BW system and no one is able to execute BW reports. U know how critical the Sales reports are especially during these days when sales are at their peak. Get it resolved and update me asap.” I cursed my evil mind and woke up.
This blog is dedicated to all the BW consultants that had a rocking 31st night but not-so-pleasant January 1, 2010.
Issue:
Whenever a user was trying to execute a BW report for fetching the information on January 01, 2011, on the selection screen of the report, a warning is thrown when F4 is pressed to select a date (for which he may want to run the report for). Yes, we software practitioners do not care about the Warnings, but end-users PANIC!
The Warning shown is like the snapshot shown below -
Analysis:
We also observed the same, when we tried running the report at our respective systems (4 of them). We trust our user, but as a part of the Root-Cause-Analysis, Step 1 says ‘Replicate the issue.’ Now, we as usual went ahead (ignoring the Warning) and ran the report specifying the Dates manually on the selection screen (and not selecting it by browsing it from the Calendar). The report output was available and it was correct (‘Validation of the information with the Source System’ was Step 6 in RCA guidelines. We skipped the rest in between, since this was a HIGH PRIORITY issue).
Ok, so now we knew the impact of the issue is not major. We could have asked the users to run it in spite of the Warning the way we did, but refrained from doing it (this step was not mentioned in the RCA guidelines).
Resolution:
We understood it from the problem definition above that the issue is not with the dates but with browsing the Calendar (from F4 help) and since we got correct information into the BW system, transaction data has flown correctly in the BW system.
In a BW system, there are preconfigured factory calendars provided by SAP, which are used to perform date related operations, conversions, configuration of holidays, etc. These can be seen in transaction SCAL. This transaction shows all the preconfigured calendars and their validity.
The Validity Periods seen above are actually as a result of the Global settings maintained in the Source (ECC) system. That is, the Germany (Standard) Calendar (Cal ID: 01) is valid from 1999 till 2010. Please note, this implies either the validity of Germany Calendar in the Source system is also with the same validity or the recent settings have not been replicated in the BW system.
We observed that the transaction data has flown correctly in BW which means transactions have been performed in the source (ECC) system with the dates in 2011 which means the calendar is working fine in the source (ECC) system.
Replicate the ‘Global Settings’ from the respective source (ECC) system by ‘Rebuilding tables’ for ‘Factory Calendar’. Please refer to the snapshot below –
After performing the above steps (replicating the Global settings for Factory Calendar), you will see the changes reflected in SCAL. We notice that the Factory Calendar for India (Cal ID: IN) has changed its validity till 2020. This has been replicated from the source (ECC) system.
But, the user observed only a Warning at the Selection (user input) screen. Yes, this has to be checked in transaction RSRHIERARCHYVIRT (in BW, of course). As seen below, the Default Factory Cal. ID should be in sync with the Cal ID for which we observed extended validity after replicating settings from the source system (this can again be checked in SCAL).
This resolves our issue and the users were and will be able to run the reports in 2011 as in 2010…
I updated my boss with the same, and yes this time he wished me back as well!
Happy New Year to all my fellow mates! Wish u a successful 2011!
DISCLAIMER: The views in this blog and the 31st night party are my own and should strictly be considered as personal.
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