Changing System Time Zone in GTS

[Former Member]

Changing the GTS System Time Zone is (and always has been) strongly discouraged by SAP.  SAP did however, recommend that we should change the system time zone in ECC which is set to CST (that is also what GTS is set to.)  Has anybody attempted changing the GTS System Time Zone? 

Were there any serious issues?  Anybody have any ideas about what I should watch for?  IF we do this we will start in a sandbox anyway, but I'm looking for things to watch for.

Thanks!

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Doug,

Things to watch out for when dealing with time zones is usually the relevant dates/times, ie it happened in customs management area before.

GTS stores the date in UTC universal time stamps, which is then transformed and adjusted to the local time zone before showing on the screen, which means a few hours plus or minus, usually.

A good test scenario would be, if you`re integrating with for example outbound delivery/invoice to customs, to see the export date/time, presentation date/time, and other time and date information, to see if the information matches ECC data exactly.

Typically problem would be that the ecc only sends you a date say, 25.11.2014, without any information about hours/minutes, this is transformed into UTC timestamp with defaulted added time information, hours 12:00:00 (midday) usually, sent to GTS and there again from UTC the local time would be derived using the local time-zone difference to UTC.. 

In the extreme cases the date can swing up and down by 1 day, this would be the difference between ECC document and GTS document.

Hope this helps,

Branio

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Branio,

Good info, thanks, but have you (or anybody else you know of) ever actually changed the time zone in a GTS system?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Doug,

Not really, to be honest, it wasnt exactly your scenario.

We were adding second ECC feeder system with diff time zone setup. And we had lots of Z code as well that caused to some part timezone issues..

What Vincent mentions below is also to the point, the screen is personalized for the user based on their user defaults. Also, this personalization for user also happens when outputs (idocs,forms) are sent out, (depends how much of your own Z* logic you`re usin,) so you might want to include them in your testing as well

Cheers,

B

[former_member131774]

Hi Doug,

May I know the reason why you want to change the system time zone?

Normally you should change user Personal Time Zone in T-code : SU01 -> Defaults. So that your user will always see the date in your timezone instead of changing server time zone.

Best regards,

Vincent

[Former Member]

Hi Vincent,

Currently, we face several issues with dates/times in the system, (ex. issues with create/change dates & times in PRCTS and PRCTSC, PRCON etc.) and of course we also have a good bit of Z-programming around classifications.  More importantly, a recent evaluation of our ECC system by SAP resulted in the recommendation that we change the ECC system time zone.  According to the SAP reviewers, the ECC system time zone should be the timezone where the servers are located, but should not include daylight savings time compensations, (UTC-5, or UTC-6 for us.)  In GTS we currently only have Compliance activated, and we are using Customs for classifications only.  (Future projects are planned for more functionality.) 

The system time zone in both ECC and GTS was originally set to CST (the SAP recommendation for GTS is to use UTC - check every config guide since 1.0 and the recommendation has always been UTC.) 

The decision now, is for ECC is to reset the system time zone to UTC-6 (or UTC-5, tbd) in keeping with SAP's recommendation, so we are wondering what, if anything,  we should do for our GTS system - leave the system time zone as it is, change it to the same time zone as ECC, or take advantage of what is going on in ECC and change GTS to UTC anticipating that some of our issues may resolve themselves.

Hence, my question - has anybody ever changed the system time zone in their active GTS system and what were the effects (positive and negative?)   It's beginning to sound like if we do this, we may be the first to ever attempt it.

Doug