SAP R/3 for Everyone: Step-by-Step Instructions, Practical Advice, and Other Tips and Tricks for Working with SAP

"A simplistic but comprehensible model is better than a precise but incomprehensible one.

Patrick Domenico (American scientist)

The lessons in this book provide instructions on the general use of SAP. They describe procedures that are universal to this system: that is, procedures that can be used in every module and on all transactions, regardless of their specific purposes.

We close this book with a final lesson about the transactions themselves. When you look through the SAP menu folders of the SAP Easy Access screen, you will see a dizzying array of hundreds of transactions. For the most part, you will probably work with only a handful of them, maybe one or two dozen at most, but nonetheless, you may still wonder, How will I learn all of these different procedures?

There are two answers to that question.

First, your employer will probably give you job aids or other help documents that describe the execution of specific transactions in great detail. Job aids are especially helpful in this regard because they show you every screen you will see, every field in which you will enter data, every button you will click from the beginning to the end of a single transaction (see the sample in the Appendix).

Second, you should not be overwhelmed by the number of transactions and seeming complexity of the SAP system, because there is less there than meets the eyeat least, from the vantage point of the typical end-user. When you step back and look at all the transactions, you will see that there are only four general tasks that they can dothat is, there are really only four basic transaction types, and nearly every transaction can be classified as one of these four types. Furthermore, once you learn to run one transaction of a given type, you will know how to run all transactions of that type, because they all require you to enter roughly the same data on their initial screens and they all generate roughly the same sort of output.

The four basic transaction types can be grouped into two classes, which we call the reporting and processing transactions.

The reporting transactions display objectsthat is, they display the SAP database record for a tangible object (such as a department, piece of equipment, or consumable material), or an activity (such as a work order or purchase requisition)and display lists of related objects. Because they only read the database and do not alter its contents, they are the most commonly executed types of transactions for most end-users.

The processing transactions create and change objects (that is, their SAP database records). They have a significant impact on the content, and hence quality, of the SAP database. Consequently, they are usually executed only by a select few employees in a company, and most users do not have access or authority to use them.

This book ends with an overview of the four basic transaction types and their common properties and procedures. To illustrate the transaction types, we describe the procedures for displaying, list-displaying, creating, and changing one object: the record for a plant maintenance order (or what we call a work order), which is typically used by plant managers to track the activities and costs of installing and maintaining equipment.