[MDG-F]: New hierarchy upload modes for file upload

From a long time hierarchy restructuring process in MDG-F has been tedious and time consuming and customers have requested SAP to provide better way to handle the overall hierarchy restructuring process. With the customer connection program for MDG 2023 SAP has provided new options in file upload to restructure the hierarchies.

CURRENT CHALLENGES

Customers with bigger hierarchies >75~100K nodes, restructuring has been always been challenging since the file upload application goes for timeout or memory issues. It happens as the only option currently to restructure is to use “Delete ALL” mode while using file upload and the system takes a lot of time to delete the entire hierarchy and re-create the new one. For customers where hierarchies are re-structured multiple times during a year, the file upload process creates a bottleneck in their operations.

In this blog post we will cover basic details of these upload modes.

INTRODUCTION

The new hierarchy upload modes are released with the note 3258404, this note is applicable from S/4 HANA 1809 onwards. The 3 new modes introduced are listed below:

1. Replace nodes -> For each uploaded edge in the file, the system deletes all direct children of the edge’s parent node and creates only the children specified in the upload file. The sequence of the children from the file is considered. This mode could also be used to simply change the sequence of nodes without applying other changes.

2. Move children-> For each uploaded edge in the file, the system checks whether the child of that edge also exists under different nodes within the same hierarchy and removes it from those. Then, this child is placed under the new parent as the last object.

3. Remove Edges-> For each uploaded edge in the file, the system deletes such edge in the system if it exists. There will be a warning if it does not exist.

MAIN CONTENT

1. In the file upload application, the upload mode now has these 3 additional options when the type of transfer is “Hierarchies”.

2. Let’s take an example of a sample CC hierarchy and see how each upload mode works.

3. MOVE CHILDREN: Now we want to move CC1_YK cost centre under group PARIS, to JAPAN. Here we will use move children option since we want to just move one of the children of a node to a different node.

4. REPLACE NODES: Lets’ say we want to reorder the CC groups, currently PARIS is first and then JAPAN. But in the new hierarchy structure we need to move JAPAN to top and then PARIS, then we will use replace node.

5. REMOVE EDGES: Now suppose we want to remove CG121212 from the below hierarchy then we upload the file with remove edges option