Purpose
This component leads you through the individual work steps required to manage reports from report generation to report release.
Reports without references to a specification do not appear in report management, but are handled as released reports after the assignment of a generation variant to the report template and appear directly in the report information system.
Features
The generated reports contain all specification-related data and phrases for a particular language and usage. All other current parameters are generated later during shipping. You can use user exits to control the parameter values determined by the SAP System during the process, and you can overwrite them manually in report management if necessary.
Flexible Release Status
In Customizing for Product Safety, you can vary the status sequence the reports must follow. In this way, you can define different control points in report management through which a report must pass before it is released for shipping. You use the
generation variant to determine which statuses a report must go through in the status sequence (see Report Status Network).Versioning
Version numbers are assigned to reports to determine if a report was changed in a way that is relevant or not to its predecessor. In updated reports, the changed specification data is displayed in a different color, thereby providing an instant overview of all relevant changes.
Creating Worklists Automatically
The SAP System ensures that when changes are made to specification or phrase data, new report requests are created automatically for the reports affected by these changes.
Linking into Word
You can compare any two reports and display the differences between them using a link between your system and a suitable display application (Microsoft Word, Adobe File Utilities, for example).
Integrating Inbound Reports
Report management allows you to manage imported reports. This applies for
inbound reports that were not generated in an SAP System but originate from an external system (see also Report Import: Process). You can display inbound reports in report management in any format, provided the corresponding application is installed on your front end.