Archived wrong info records

[Former Member]

Hi All

I need some serious help here please.

I archived MM_EINA 7 days ago with the assumption that it would only archive those purchasing info records that have the deletion indicator set on client level by all Purchasing Organizations.

This was not the case and 70 000 records without Organizational Data and 3 with, was archived and deleted.

When a Purchase order now needs to be changed it notifies us that there is no info record.

Our SRM system is now also creating new info records on the ECC box, but data linked to the archived info record can not be accessed.

What can I do?

Thanks

Stiaan

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi

The archiving was run in test mode first and users signed off a FD after they tested aswell.

All archived info records can be viewed from transaction ME1A. Thats also not a problem.

We were under the impression that only those with the deletion indicator set will be archived.

But we have since established that none of the archived info records had organizational data assigned to it.

Users created info records with only plant allocation.

This seems to be the criteria used by SAP to identify archivable info records.

The problem comes in when a Purchase Order is changed.

We have tested and seen that by creating a new info record for the material in ME11 the problem can be resolved.

This we are doing to handle immediate quiries.

My concern is how any statistical data will be affected when there have been 2 info records assigned to a Vendor and material (one archived and the other not)

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

But we have since established that none of the archived info records had organizational data assigned to it.
Users created info records with only plant allocation.

isn't the second sentence already inconsistent with the first?

Have you tried to create to create an info record without entering a purchasing organization but with a plant ?

I receive an error message 06301.

In ME1A you will see only archived info record, ME1M will show you current info records.

Of course, if you merge the results of both then you will see 2 info records for the same vendor/material combination.

But do you really do analysis and statistics on archived info records? ME1A is used occasionally to check the one or other detail of an historic info record......certainly not a transaction that my users would use more than 2 times in a year .

I miss a bit of concept in your case.

Why does one archive info records? or even earlier, why does one flag an info record for deletion? Either the material cannot be procured anymore from this vendor, or the vendor didn't survive the last crisis.

Subsequently in most cases, the material or the vendor will have a deletion mark as well

So there should not often be a situation that a new info record will be created for this vendor/material combination.

Usually the next step after info record archiving is either material master or vendor master archiving.

If you think that the SAP standard programs did something wrong, then you should try this case again either as productive run in a test environment, or as test run in production environment. and if you can confirm your assumption, then you need to log an incident at SAP directly, to get this program error fixed.

[Former Member]

When the archiving of Info Records occurred it only removed data from tables EINA and EIPA.

We therefore had reference data on EINE from where we update.

We tested the program an hour ago and it works.

Some of the function modules called are

'ME_EKKO_SINGLE_READ'

'BAPI_PO_GETDETAIL'

'BAPI_INFORECORD_GETLIST'

'BAPI_PO_CHANGE'

I can now breath normally again.

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi

Thanks for the input. Conclusion is as follows:

When I did a test archive on our development box, I noticed that only 5 info records were archivable (thus flagged for deletion).

Our last copy from Production to Development was last year December. Copy from Production to Integration box was in June. The assumption is therefore that somebody ran ME16 for a range of info records on Production box between December and June. Investigation showed that we have 8 users with 06 access to ME16 in the company. All senior people and we will therefore not push the cause any further. (Luckily I'm not on that list))

We have archived MM_EKKO, MM_EBAN and MM_EINA as preparation for the Material Master archiving which will occur early next year. You are right archiving of MM_EINA was probably not necessary and caused us more problems than good. During the past eight months I have archived 600 Gig of data off our production box without any incident. Now this, and the gain was only to be a couple of MB. Suppose this is how we learn.

Our fix: I exported a list of the 70 000 archived info records with the material to a spreadsheet and inserted these in a table. We will now write a program that will go through all our Purchase Orders, comparing info record numbers. If found in the table (thus archived) the program will then create a new info record for the PO. Let's hope it works otherwise we will have to do a manual ME11 and then a change on the PO for every PO that gets changed.

Thanks for the brainstorming

[JL23]

with the automatic creation of info records thru POs you will miss the price conditions. If your purchasing guys are activly maintaining prices in the info record, then this info is lost except you read thru the archived data and try to rebuild the conditions.

The archiving of info records is a must if you want archive materials. so you cant avoid this step. But if you analyze first the to-be archived materials, then you can focus only on those info records with info record archiving.

Your system seems almost be as big as ours, I archived 1 Tera last year

[JL23]

What can I do? 

Pray that you wont be killed by the users and dont get fired by your boss.

I archived MM_EINA 7 days ago with the assumption that it would only archive those purchasing info records that have the deletion indicator set on client level by all Purchasing Organizations.
This was not the case and 70 000 records without Organizational Data and 3 with, was archived and deleted.

I dont believe the that the standard archiving program would archive data that does not have deletion indicators. Can it be that you have set the deletion indicators using a wrong selection in ME16 or with an own program or with the preprocessing program rm06iv47 ?

Didn't you test teh archving run before executing it in production? A full test should already have told you in the log how many records would be archived.

Unfotunatly SAP has not forseen to reload archived inforecord. However with money and programs you can usually make anything happen. so you may pay SAP for developing such program for you.

However, one can only reload records from an archive if the archive can be accessed.

but you said:

 but data linked to the archived info record can not be accessed.

which again I cant believe, if the archive would not be accessible, then the SAP deletion program (extra step in archiving sequence) would not have deleted any record from your SAP tables (EINA, EINE etc.) as SAP checks if an archive can be accessed before it deletes the data from the tables.

Or did you delete the written archive file manually from the system? In this case you will never be able to get the records back.