Process

All mass activities have a uniform layout. You enter data on the following tab pages:

On the Technical Settings tab, you can choose either an automatic load distribution made by the system, where you enter only the number of jobs, or an explicit load distribution. For the explicit load distribution, you have two options:

For more information about the entries on the individual tabs, see Functions for Scheduling Program Runs. Once you have made all of the entries required to execute the business process, you can schedule the program run. You can choose between immediate processing in the background or processing on a specific date. If you use the job container, you can also select the containers available. During the processing of the data, the system distributes the dataset to be processed to several parallel jobs automatically. The details for distributing the keys for the parallel objects are stored in variants that you have to update periodically. For example, you can create a variant for the business partners that splits the business partner set to be processed into 1,000 equal intervals. During parallel processing, the system makes sure that the processes do not block each other because of changing accesses to the same database resources, which could be the case, for example, in the assignment of document numbers or the update of transaction figures.

You can schedule the parallel interval jobs of mass activities, execute them in a specific order, and monitor them using the following tools:

With the module FKJO_SCHEDULE, you can also schedule mass activity runs using RFC (see SAP Note 402886).

If an interval cannot be processed in a payment run, interest run, or interest calculation run for cash security deposits because the data is locked by another processing function, the system can restart the processing of this interval automatically and as frequently as required. You have to enter the maximum number of repetitions in Customizing for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable under  Technical Settings Prepare Mass Activities in the specifications for General Control on the Job Control tab in the Max. Repetition field.

In all mass activities, the system checks the authorizations for authorization object F_KKMA that checks the authorization for the mass activity using the mass activity type. The processing of the variants is protected by the authorization object F_KKVARI (see the documentation for the authorization objects).

You can improve the performance of mass activities through settings in Customizing, such as activating the business partner shadow table. To do so, in Customizing for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable, choose  Technical Settings Activate Performance Improvement for Mass Runs . Read the documentation for the activity and the individual fields.

In Customizing under  Technical Settings Generate Interval Variants for Parallel Processes , you can create and change interval variants for parallelization (see the documentation of the Customizing activity).