Initial Data Transfer

Use

Prerequisites

The following questions should be answered before beginning the initial data transfer:

• Which business objects are to be transferred?

  This depends on which business applications you will use. If you are using sales and distribution processing, for example, you have to transfer the material master records as well as the sales master records.

• How should the business objects be transferred?

  Various techniques are available for loading the data.

Process

The graphic below describes the possible tasks involved in transferring the data:

The Data Transfer Workbench provides integrated project management for all the required steps involved in transferring data to your system.

A project consists of one or more subprojects, each subproject consists of one or more run definitions, and each run definition consists of one or more tasks. These objects are displayed in a hierarchy in the project management.

When the run is started, all the tasks of the run definition are carried out in sequence when the associated programs are called.

You need to use programs or function modules for the various steps.

Once you have created a project, you can start a run. The tasks of a run definition are processed in order. The result of a run is displayed as status information in color (green, yellow or red) in the hierarchy.

The process of transferring data for each object can be divided into the following steps:

1. Prepare the data transfer

   • Extract: In the first step, you extract the existing data from a source system into a file.

   • Clean: Clean the data in this file if necessary (more information: Analyzing and Cleaning Legacy Data and Creating Example Files and Analyzing Structures).

   • Convert: You have to convert your extracted and cleaned data into the structures of the transfer file.

2. Transfer Data

   • Create projects: With the Data Transfer Workbench, you can create projects, sub-projects, and run definitions (more information: Organizing Transfer in Projects).

   • Load: SAP provides a range of transfer programs and interfaces (BAPIs) for loading data. They require a transfer file in an appropriate SAP format. One of the techniques available is used to load the data into the system, depending on the type of business object. If more than one of these methods is available for an object type, read the documentation to distinguish between their objectives. For more information, see Data Transfer in Runs.

   • Check: After the data has been successfully loaded into your system, it can be checked there.