All about Inventory Management....- Marker Update, No Marker Update (BW-BCT-MM-IM)



by: Colum Cronin

Purpose

To explain the Marker Update & No Marker Update concepts within the Inventory Management.

Overview

The use of Marker Update & No Marker Update is a cause of frequent confusion, which I hope to clear up with this page.

Marker Update

  • Updating the marker (i.e. Marker Update) is a special feature available only for noncumulative InfoCubes.
  • This is done to improve the performance of the query read, especially when reading the current stock..
  • It is used to reduce the time of fetching the non-cumulative key figures while reporting.
  • It helps to easily get the values of previous stock quantities while reporting.
  • The marker is a point in time which marks an opening stock balance.
  • Data up to the marker is compressed.

No Marker Update

  • The No Marker Update concept arises if the target InfoCube contains a non-cumulative key figure.
  • For example, take the Material Movements InfoCube 0IC_C03 where stock quantity is a non-cumulative key figure. The process of loading the data into the cube involves in two steps:
  1. In the first step, one should load the records pertaining to the opening stock balance or the stock present at the time of implementation. At this time we will set marker to update (uncheck 'no marker update') so that the value of current stock quantity is stored in the marker. After that, when loading the historical movements (stock movements made previous to the time of implementing the cube) we must check marker update so that the marker should not be updated (because of these historical movements, only the stock balance / opening stock quantity has been updated; i.e. we have already loaded the present stock and the aggreagation of previous/historical data accumulates to the present data).
  2. After every successful delta load, we should not check marker update (we should allow to update marker) so that the changes in the stock quantity should be updated in the marker value. The marker will be updated to those records which are compressed. The marker will not be updated to those uncompressed requests. Hence for every delta load request, the request should be compressed.

Check or uncheck the Marker Option

  • Compress the request with stock marker => uncheck the marker update option.
  • Compress the loads without the stock marker => check the marker update option.

Relevant FAQs

  • The marker isn't relevant when no data is transferred (e.g. during an delta init without data transfer). 
  • The marker update is just like a check point (it will give the snapshot of the stock on a particular date when it is updated).
  • The request in which the opening stock (Initialization) is loaded must always be compressed WITH a marker update.
  • The request in which historical material documents are contained must always be compressed WITHOUT a marker update. This is necessary because the historical material movements are already contained in the opening stock.
  • Successive delta uploads must always be compressed WITH marker updates.

Related Content

Related Notes

SAP Note 643687 Compressing non-cumulative InfoCubes
SAP Note
834829 Compression of BW InfoCubes without update of markers
SAP Note
745788 Non-cumulative mgmnt in BW: Verifying and correcting data
SAP Note
586163 Composite Note on SAP R/3 Inventory Management in SAP BW

Related Documentation

0 comments: