The following describes the steps (in sequential order) that you would follow to complete the procedure.
1. Create a forward maintenance proposal
The first thing that you must do in order to schedule mass updates to your Business partner file or Item file is to create a new Forward maintenance proposal, Header.
Forward maintenance proposals allow you to group together the changes that you wish to make to either the Item file or the Business partner file. For example, you can create a proposal named “Delivery info” that will specify changes to the MOT and TOD information of certain customers. Once a proposal has been created its status will be set to 00.
Each proposal is flagged with a status code that monitors its lifecycle. This allows you to track the proposals from beginning to end, to monitor whether they have been successfully created and, ultimately, whether the updates have been made.
| Status | Description |
|---|---|
| 00 | The proposal has been created but it does not contain any detail information, i.e. the records that need to be updated have not been selected and New values have not been specified. |
| 10 | New values have been specified. The proposal is open and can still be changed at this stage. |
| 30 | The proposal has been scheduled for update. |
| 35 | The update has been submitted. |
| 40 | The update is currently being processed. |
| 45 | The update has been performed but has ended with errors being reported in the error log (received DI documents in error). Note: In this case you must use the Err log option (available on the initial Work with forward maintenance proposals panel) to display/delete the error message or to maintain the record. Once the errors have been corrected you must re-start the update using the Start/Re-start upd option. |
| 60 | The update has been successfully completed. Note: To view proposals that have reached this status access the Forward maintenance proposal enquiry program or click More selections and remove the filter that is defaulted to the Status field. |
2. Define new values
You must specify the information that is to be added to, or removed from, your target records.
3. Define a search criteria
A search tool is provided within the forward maintenance proposal that allows you to select only the business partners or items that you wish to update. For example: a criteria can be defined that will select every business partner that is:
- located in a specific Area
- assigned to a particular Handler
- handled by a specific Shipping agent
For all the records that match this criteria you will define new values that will overwrite their existing MOT and TOD information.
A selection criteria specifies to the system which records to select when it searches through the Item file or Business partner file. Only active records that match it will be updated. These are commonly referred to as the target records. The more information that you add to your selection criteria, the narrower your search results will be.
4. Update Business partner file or Item file
The last step in the forward maintenance process would be to execute the changes that are outlined in the proposal. You can choose to do the update immediately or schedule it for a fixed date and time. There is an option that will give you the flexibility of excluding items or business partners from the update before they are changed (see Include/exclude records from update using the Forward maintenance functionality).
Note: Items and business partners that have been inactivated will not be selected for update.
Related topics
- About the Forward maintenance functionality
- Create a forward maintenance proposal
- Define new values for a forward maintenance proposal
- Enter selection criteria for a forward maintenance proposal
- Include/exclude records from update using the Forward maintenance functionality
- Schedule/un-schedule updates using the Forward maintenance functionality
- Manually start an update to item and/or business partner data using the Forward maintenance functionality