Mass Upload - ALE/IDOC or BAPI approch

[Former Member]

Hi Guys,

I have to upload material master and we have options to do it by either ALE/IDOC or BAPI approach. The quantity of materials is quite huge. I tried to find some comparison about different approaches so as to know when to use what but not able to get exact information. Kindly suggest which one is usually preferred for mass upload and if possible provide some links for more references.

Thanks,

Brijesh Soni

[JL23]

I expressed my opinion in thread asked last February.

dont look just at the very last step of a migration process. More time critical than the material master load is the inventory load. 
Material masters are usually loaded weeks ahead of go-live, inventory just in a short time window of a few hours at go-live date. 
It does not really help to look at the pure load time for materials ( I dont really care if that takes 8 hours or 20 hours), if you are not familiar with direct input method but experienced in IDOC method, then it would not make sense to switch to direct input method just to be 4 hours quicker when loading, if you need 100 hours more for the developement.

[Former Member]

Hi Jürgen,

Yeh you are correct, all methods works. Just need to see which one will take how much time for development and which one we are more comfortable with. But is there something like recommendation from SAP about giving first preference to some particular method for data upload? Or all methods are jst fine.

Thanks.

Brijesh

[JL23]

I have never seen such recomendations or benchmarks

SAP has a homepage for benchmarks: http://www.sap.com/solutions/benchmark/index.epx

the source is the same, then result is the same. all steps in LSMW are the same. you have to map the same fields in any method.

BAPI may have some more structures than IDOC or batch input. so just minutes more to assign the source structure to the target structure. .

it is a historical growth or development. It started with batch input to process SAP transactions en mass

then the IDOCs came to exchange data between 2 SAP systems.

and then we got the BAPIs to execute SAP transactions even from a non-sap system.

the result is in all three methods a created material master.

LSMW is a toolbox which gives you any of the available import methods.

there are other aspects to be considered in a migration.

What if you have errors? do you correct them yourself, or do you want the business people to fix them.

if you want business people to fix wrong data, then a batch import method may be the first option, as you can process it in foreground. It is too much complicated for a Non-IT-person to edit values in IDOCs. (even the performance may be better than a batch input)

[madhu_vadlamani]

Hi Soni,

Almost all Jurgen answered .You can select any method as your wish.Check with idoc method.

Regards,

Madhu.

[Former Member]

Thanks All.