SAP Expert continues a series of articles about the SAP transport system and objects that require “special treatment” when moving across multi-system landscapes.
We have already spoken about Tax Codes, Number Ranges and Substitutions/Validations.
Today it is the turn of Calendars
Introduction
Calendar is an object in SAP that is used in different situations. For example, HR uses calendars to properly calculate payroll. Logistics uses calendars to plan production and delivery activities. Even Finance may use calendars for some background job planning.
Calendar maintenance can be split into three layers. They are like three parts of the SCAL transaction.
Transaction SCAL
- First, you need to maintain a list of holidays that are relevant to your calendar. Each holiday may have different rules for calculation, like fixed day, or offset to Easter, or even floating day from year to year.
- Second, you assign holidays to your holiday calendar and specify the validity of the calendar itself and of the holidays within it.
- And third, you create a logistics (or sometimes it is called a “factory”) calendar, which has default workdays, uses the holiday calendar, and may have some special rules.
This is the logistics calendar which may be used in delivery planning or job scheduling.
Including Calendar in the transport
Calendar is a cross-client object. It means that if you have maintained your calendar in the Development client of your Development system, all other clients in the same system get exactly the same changes immediately. You do not need to do anything in this case.
However, if you need to move calendar changes across to the Test or Production system, you need to use the transport system.
Before moving changes, you need to consider whether it is better to maintain the calendar in each system individually, or move changes via the transport system. Both approaches have benefits and downsides, and it is up to you to decide for the project who does the maintenance of the actual Production calendar, and in which system it is done.
If you decided to make changes in the Development system and then move them across, you need to bear in mind two things:
- Transporting Calendar includes the full, and only full, content of SCAL transaction: holidays, holiday calendars, logistics calendars. You cannot move only part of it.
- Transport, once in new system, will erase all calendar-related data in the target system, and fully rewrite it with new data. Therefore, it is highly advisable to either always maintain Calendar in Production or always transport it. Cross-over will not do any good.
So, if you decided to include the calendar data into the transport, here are 5 steps for it:
- Create or request creation of workbench transport request.
- Call up transaction SCAL.
- Select menu Calendar – Transport.
Transporting Calendar
- Read and confirm information shown on the pop-up window.
- Specify transport request.
Now you are ready to release the transport request and move it to your target system using the Transport System functionality.
How do you maintain Calendar in your system? How do you use Calendars?