The Consultant's Blog November 2012
After you have been in the consulting game for awhile, you get so attuned to hunting down bugs and solving problems
that you forget that you had to learn these skills yourself once. It might have been a long time ago, but the basics of
good troubleshooting remain the same. For me, if there is one solid piece of advice I can give anyone, it is this:
Re-create the problem first!
That might seem terribly obvious but if this is your first year of consulting, something has gone wrong and everyone seems to be
looking at you, then the obvious can often be missed.
The thing is, not every defect / bug / issue presents itself in a convenient custom made piece of logic where you can breathe a sigh of relief
and hand it back over to the ABAP developer. Often these things pop up in standard SAP transactions and reports – unexpected results
that can leave us wondering where on earth to start!
Here are the steps I take to find out the root cause of the problem:
- 1) Re-create the problem, preferably in a Development environment where you will be allowed to de-bug it later. Note, LATER! De-bugging should never be a functional consultant’s first step of investigation.
- 2) If you can’t re-create the problem, compare your master and transactional data carefully with the problem example you have been given. More often than not, it is bad master data that causes unexpected results. Alternatively, check that it isn’t a classic user problem doing steps differently to what you would expect.
- 3) Once you have re-created the problem, try and isolate when it went wrong. Just because this one example was reported, doesn’t mean the problem started with it. It may have been a problem for a few days, a week or longer but just not recognized or reported till now. You will need to know this so that you can ensure the ‘clean up’ is thorough after you have solved the problem.
- 4) Double check all relevant master data is accurate (customer master, material master, pricing condition records, BOMs, and so on). Is the problem occurring for just one set of data, one organizational unit but not others? If so, that gives you clues to investigate further – what in the design differs between these that may be causing the problem? Dig deeper – it probably won’t be caused by the first thing that comes to mind!
- 5) Try de-bugging the example you have created. If you are not sure how, ask for an ABAP resource to sit with you so that together you can analyse the technical and functional logic as you work through the example.
- 6) Research! If you have an error message, Google it! Many of these problems have been found and resolved by others over the years and the internet is a vast resource of information. Log on to SAP’s Service Marketplace and search the OSS note database too, not just google for OSS notes. Not every OSS note makes it quickly out onto the google search pages.
- 7) Finally, if none of these things work and you are still stuck, ask your colleagues to look at it also. SAP is a very integrated beast and often a colleague looking at the problem from a different perspective may see something that is not obvious to you. For example, Finance issues with releasing billing documents to accounting can be caused by incorrect pricing procedures.
The most important thing is not to panic, even when it is a Production issue and you think your career depends on you solving it ‘yesterday’!
SAP is very logical – to troubleshoot efficiently and effectively, you need to be too!
Past Blogs
Please click on the appropriate link below to view past blogs:
The Origin of the Functional Spec - April 2012
The Life of the SAP Functional Spec - May 2012
Get an Inside Track to Successful Consulting - June 2012
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