How to Change the behavior of an SAP Program ?

Let me first ask you why do we even need to change SAP programs ?

Dude..!! You don’t need to think so much.

My guess is most of you already know the answer.

Here is my explanation.

SAP is a business software.
It helps business record their individual business transactions and generate reports on them.

Business operations, are called business processes in SAP and are broken into a series of SAP transactions.

Examples of a Business operation would be

• Hiring an Employee – SAP HCM module
• Creating a Sales order – SAP SD module
• Creating a Material Master record – SAP MM module
• Creating a Grant – SAP Grants module.

A business operation in SAP can be recorded with a single transaction.
For example maintaining a Grant can be done via a single transaction GMGRANT.

While other business operations need a series of transactions performed by different people at different times.
For Example Employee submitting a Time-sheet using Transaction CAT2 and the manager approving it using CATS_APPR.

Behind each of these transactions are a bunch of underlying SAP Programs.

SAP delivers a lot of programs to cater to various scenarios. These programs are called standard programs. Usually these programs are enough to record a usual business process.

Usual Business processes are called Industry standard business processes and work on Industry accepted principles.

However sometimes a particular client operation for a particular customer cannot be satisfied by a delivered SAP program. This happens because of the particular nature of the business.

This is called a GAP.

Hey!! I did not mean GAP, the clothing company.

I mean a GAP in the business operation. A particular business process which cannot be mapped into SAP software.

The process of identifying Gaps in a business process is called GAP Analysis and is usually done during the Business Blueprinting Phase in the ASAP Methodology followed for SAP Implementation. And these Gaps have to be filled.

It is for this reason that we have to Change an SAP Program behavior.

So next time you are asked to change SAP program you know exactly what GAP in the business you are filling.

Have you every changed standard SAP Program ?

If so, I would like to hear, how you did it.
Was it through a Customer Exit, User Exit, BADI, Enhancement, Modification ?

I would love to know what Business GAP were you filling.

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PS: In my next blog I will cover the topics of Exits, so stay tuned.

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Linkin Pereira