As a rule, one of the first things you should carry out during the SAP system start-up is the transfer of stock from a legacy system. This step is necessary because it is usually not possible to manually create initial data in the SAP system due to the multitude of stocks, or because you would like to post goods movements using IDocs.

You can transfer stock from external systems in one of two ways:

• via direct input

• via Application Link Enabling (ALE)

During the data transfer you can maintain all stock with all required data exactly as you would in the dialog. If you use the data transfer with ALE, the data is transferred in an IDoc.

Typical application examples are:

• The transfer of stock from an R/2 system or from external systems.
• The transfer of goods movements from external systems.

With the AFS IDoc type you can process goods movements of standard materials as well as those of AFS materials. Only the inbound IDoc is implemented.

The mapping of the grid values using ALE works the same as in the dialog transaction. The mapping of the categories also works the same as in the dialog transaction.