ITC Server

iWay project is keep going. There are three initial projects.

• One of our customers doesn’t use EDI, so we couldn’t able to use EDI system. They just sent a comma delimited file for their orders. And we have been creating Sales Orders manually. Without changing file format, iWay would get this file as a source file, and then create Sales Orders in SAP R/3.
• Second one is website integration. The company has an initiative to build a website to sell products to consumers. When the website gets an order, it needs to check inventory for the ordered product then submit the order into the company’s system. Obviously the company’s system refers to SAP R/3. Initial thought is creating a Web Service to submit the order. The website will consume the Web Service. iWay would generate the Web Service.
• We have hundreds of customers who submit their orders to the company. The company had created a Spreadsheet File which is being used by the customers. Currently they sent the file to the company, then all process is being done manually. So by using iWay, this process will be automated. We need a small modification on the file, but we will use the same file in general. So the customers should not do anything special.

There is case for the third one. Initially we chose ORDERS05 IDOC Type for submitting Sales Orders into SAP R/3. As you know that SAP needs a partner profile to get an inbound IDOC, and generally one customer refers to one partner in EDI/IDOC interface. But right now we are talking about hundreds of customers. The question is do we need to create a partner for each customer or is there any other solution? I asked this question and SDN ABAP Development Forum: EDI / IDOC Single Partner for Multiple Partners. I, Ferry Lianto and Jelena Perfiljeva have got this conversation:

Tuncay Karaca

Hi,

We have a scenario to create Sales Orders and we will use ORDERS05 IDOC Type. That’s the question: We will get IDOCs from lots of customers. I know that in normal situation a EDI partner (WE20) should be created for each customer who sends IDOCs. Is it possible to use the same partner number for all customers. I mean we can get the IDOC, if we see a general number in sender Partner number for all customers. So Sender Partner number in the control record and Sold-To-Number in Partners segment will be different? Is it possible?
What do you think?

Ferry Lianto

Hi,

You can use logical system (LS) as partner profile instead of customer (KU).

Regards,
Ferry Lianto

Jelena Perfiljeva

As stated above, you can use LS partner instead of KU partner. There are, however, some pros and cons to be considered:

1) Post-processing agent assignment. If you have different people working with different customers you can assign them as post-processing agents to the respective partner profiles. If you switch to LS you will need to have only one agent (it might be a group of people though).
2) When you have a separate profile for each customer then the customer number is included in the IDoc control record. This allows to quickly view the IDocs by customer number. E.g. if a customer calls and asks where the heck is my document then customer service could easily see all the IDocs for that customer in WE05, for example, and check what’s going on. With LS they would have to dig into the segments for that.

This is just from the top of my head, there might be more to it. If you don’t care for any of this you might be even better off using LS instead of KU, because it requires less maintenance.

Tuncay Karaca

Ferry,

Thank you for response. Yes you are right we can use LS partner, instead of KU partner. I am just thinking one thing: Instead of using LS partner can we use a dummy customer number (partner KU) for a group of customers. Is it a good way? What do you think? The other thing about is LS partners… Do have to create just one LS partner to each client? I know that there is LS assignment to client? So without thinking of that can I create more than one LS partner?

Jelena,

You are absolutely right for comments. The concern is we are talking about hundreds of customers who use the same technique to send their orders to us! It is not issue right now but the technique is not EDI… And we don’t worry about who is going to send orders or not?

We might think of that same Message Type e.g. ORDERS maybe should have different processing codes, so in this case we can use Message Code and Message Function to differentiate the processing code. Am I right?

Ferry Lianto

Hi Tuncay,

I am just thinking one thing: Instead of using LS partner can we use a dummy customer number (partner KU) for a group of customers. Is it a good way? What do you think? The other thing about is LS partners… Do have to create just one LS partner to each client? I know that there is LS assignment to client? So without thinking of that can I create more than one LS partner?

In general, LS partner could represent SAP client, internal and external system. Therefore, you can create more than one LS partner as partner profile (WE20).
You could also create LS partner for group of customers as well.

We might think of that same Message Type e.g. ORDERS maybe should have different processing codes, so in this case we can use Message Code and Message Function to differentiate the processing code. Am I right?

Yes, you are right. You can use message code and function to diifferentiate process code. Basically, these fields can be used for additional checking. In the past, I used these field for grouping customer and parallel processing purposes.

Hope this will help.

Regards,
Ferry Lianto

Tuncay Karaca

Jelena,

> 1) Post-processing agent assignment. If you have
> different people working with different customers you
> can assign them as post-processing agents to the
> respective partner profiles. If you switch to LS you
> will need to have only one agent (it might be a group
> of people though).

I think we missed one point here: Yes we can assign just one Post-Processing Agent to each partner, but we can also assign a Post-Processing Agent to each message in inbound or outbound section. So even though we use LS partner, we can assign different Post-Processing agent to each message.

Jelena Perfiljeva

You can not set up a dummy customer as a KU partner, unless you create a customer with a dummy number. If you want to use LS instead of KU you will most likely need to create one LS partner for each sales ogranization, or maybe even for the whole enterprise, depending on how you need the IDocs to be processed. Not sure what your requirement is exactly, but you might want to try different approaches in a test system and see for yourself which one works best. It really doesn’t take that much time and you can easily delete settings that do not work.

We have an inbound interface with type ORDERS and we accept orders from multiple customers using an LS type partner profile (one per VKORG). All orders arrive into one network folder. I would say that KU or LI type profiles are more relevant to the outbound EDI processing. For example, we don’t want the EDI output to be available for the vendors without the EDI profile and we have different people working with different vendors, hence we set up LI type profiles for the relevant vendors only.

Considering the nature of your questions, you might want to take a look at this book: SAP R/3 IDoc Cookbook for EDI and Interfaces by Axel Angeli.

Jelena Perfiljeva

Yes, you are correct: a post-processing agent can be assigned to the message type as well.

So it seems we would use an LS (Logical System) Partner. I’ll let you know!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 23rd, 2007 at 6:25 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.