SAP Transactions

The word transaction describes a single business activity that is conducted with SAP R/3. Some examples of end user transactions are

• Creating a purchase requisition

• Generating a budget report for a company department

• Scheduling the shipment of a material to a plant

• Recording the activities of a maintenance job

• Entering employees' weekly work hours

• Displaying the yearly sales for a product

Every transaction progresses through a four-step workflow of actions, commands, and events (Figure P.2).

Figure P.2. The SAP workflow. The four parts of this book each cover one step in this process.

The typical workflow begins when the end user logs on the SAP system (Step 1). This action calls up the SAP Easy Access screen, which is the default "home page" for the software. The end user works with the elements on this screen to call up or navigate to the initial screen of a transaction (Step 2), where they instruct the software on its specific objectives and then execute it (Step 3). A few seconds later, the output of the transaction appears (Step 4) in one of two forms:

• A confirmation that some business process, such as the creation of a requisition or the entry of an employee's work hours into the database, was accomplished. This message appears by default at the bottom of the initial screen.

• A display of data from the database. This usually appears on its own output screen.

A good bit of the communication between the SAP R/3 software and the end user is accomplished during Steps 3 and 4 of this SAP workflow via technical object codes.

A technical object is anything that is monitored and tracked by SAP R/3. This includes tangible objects, such as employees, consumable materials, equipment, and physical plants, and intangible ones, such as work orders, purchase requisitions, and shipping orders.

Every technical object has a unique object code, which is assigned to it when its specifications are entered in the SAP database and which is the primary shorthand means of identifying it. There are literally thousands of such codes in every SAPdatabase, but, fortunately, the software provides a way to search for them, so you do not have to memorize or record them.