In the era of cloud computing/web services, it may not be very stimulating to blog about IDOC ALV reports but I believe there are many organizations which still rely on that technology. I think there are still many global business teams supporting SAP who didn’t yet catch up with the emerging technologies.

I am sure that the headline of blog will leave many of us mulling over why we need to use this bespoke tool when SAP provides standard idoc error reporting and monitoring transactions. I am going to explain the gap and how the tool fills the gap for the business/technical ALE support teams in the next few sections.

Problem

Imagine you work in a big warehouse where stock keeps changing every second and it is important to determine the stock levels accurately for staying cut-throat in the market.  We had to build a goods movement ALE IDOC MBGMCR03 interface between legacy warehouse system and SAP ERP system that processes high volumes of goods movements to align the stocks and determine the stock levels accurately for running the business efficiently.

However things are not easy as they are said, the legacy systems as you expect are so fragile and hence the interface always had few hundreds of errors that needs to be resolved by the support teams. While the legacy teams are working hard to resolve the interface defects, the business teams have to resolve the IDOC errors manually and align missing stocks between the legacy warehouse and SAP system.

It was quite laborious and time consuming for the support team to drill down each goods movement IDOC and segments to identify the stocks that are misaligned via the transactions WE02 and WE09 and align the stocks manually between the legacy warehouse and SAP ERP system.

Solution

I thought the solution to the problem is ideally to provide the business with an IDOC ALV error report that displays IDOC Number, IDOC Status, IDOC Status Text and IDOC Segment Field and the value in the IDOC Segment Field. It will be more useful for the business users if he has an option to choose the IDOC segment fields and the filter the IDOCS based on the values in the segments.

I had done some research on the internet to check whether there are any blogs or SAP transactions that will do this but unfortunately found none. I found the standard report RSECHK05 but it doesn’t either give you a list of error IDOCS for a message type or an option to the user to select the IDOC segment fields or filter the IDOC content that he is interested to see in the ALV output.

The program RSECHK05 provided me a good starting point to develop a tool that works for any IDOC message type.