Data maintenance is the need to make mass changes to master or transactional data in SAP driven by business requirements. This is a routine business process that is usually the responsibility of the business process owner, the data owner or a data steward, such as a materials manager, financial data analyst, or an HR analyst.
While some limited data maintenance activities can be performed via SAP mass-change transactions, e.g., MM17, the most common way to perform such business-driven data maintenance is by first extracting SAP data into Excel files, making changes to the data in Excel, and finally loading the new data back into SAP. Data loading software such as Winshuttle's transactionSHUTTLE, can make the loading step of the data maintenance process much more cost effective.
Some of the common data maintenance applications in SAP leading to large cost savings include material master changes, pricing condition changes, customer or vendor master maintenance, payroll changes, or changes to purchase orders.
The image below shows an example spreadsheet for a mass transactional data change. In this example, the delivery dates are being changed for large number of purchase order line items and the data change is driven by a vendor informing the company of a delay in their shipment.
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