So we’re all moving towards SAP’s S/4 HANA, right?  Has anybody else been trying to work with the migration cockpit LTMC?  It is the primary interface that will be supported going forward for migrating your data to S/4.

My honest opinion is that I’m not yet a fan of this interface.  I should emphasize the word “yet” as I hope that things will improve.  So far I’ve found precious little documentation and even fewer examples.  OSS Note There are a few blog posts and questions in the forums.  Maybe LSMW started the same way?  I am truly disappointed to hear that LSMW is not going to be “the” tool going forward.  OSS Note 2481235 effectively says the same thing.  But you may still have to use LSMW for those items that LTMC doesn’t support – confusing, huh?  OSS Note 2287723 talks about the limitations of LSMW for S/4 On Premise.  It says to go to this link and search for “Migration Cockpit” to learn about LTMC.  I tried it and got zero results.  You must drill into the 1610 FPS02 topic in order to get results and, even then, they are underwhelming.  Another recommendation in that same note: use Rapid Data Migration based on SAP’s Data Services (see note 2239701).  If they were looking to improve usability, recommending Data Services is not going to achieve that goal.  The full version of Data Services is a beast – a tremendously powerful ETL tool, maybe one of the best on the market and definitely not for the faint of heart.  Even the watered-down version called Data Integrator is still quite powerful.  On the other hand, its functionality is fully documented, unlike LTMC.

There are currently 33 objects available to support many commonly-used data elements.  I have successfully tested some of the basic master data objects (materials, cost centers, BOM) in the state that they were provided.  These can be customized for your needs but it was not entirely obvious.  You cannot customize anything within the web interface of LTMC; you must use LTMOM and MWB.  And even these two together apparently cannot fully support a new object.

Each object uses a function module to create the elements – so in that sense LTMC is a more structured cousin of LSMW.  No recordings possible here – yet.  The upload files are XML that you can open easily with Excel.  Do not modify or customize them.  You’ll find basic transform actions are available, i.e., value X in the upload file means value Y in SAP.  The way LTMC handles this is more user-friendly than in LSMW, though I am not enamored with the need to confirm the values.  I assume this was an effort to make the system more friendly to those who are not as technically savvy.  Maybe there is an “expert mode” switch that I haven’t found yet?  This need to confirm the values comes from field-level rules that are visible in LTMOM.  There are other similarities to LSMW – for example, the project/subproject/object structure is also found in LTMC.

LTMC effectively creates a sender/receiver arrangement where the sender is the upload file and the receiver is S/4 HANA.  So it should be no surprise to hear that, underneath the covers, LTMC has taken some concepts from SAP’s Landscape Transformation Replication Server (SLT).  Though, unlike SLT, LTMC is definitely not a table level transformation tool.  When you create a new migration project in LTMC, you are asked to assign a mass transfer ID.  This same concept exists in SLT.  There are other underlying functions (e.g., precalculation) that are the same as well.  LTMC also relies heavily on background jobs to accomplish its tasks; SLT is no different.  Early in our LTMC testing, we found that some objects started jobs that ran for extremely long – tens of hours – and consumed the available background processes so that no others could test.  We had to kill those jobs to allow normal system jobs to proceed.  With S/4 1610 feature service pack 2, those issues have disappeared.  We also increased the number of background processes to six (from three).

I bring up the similarities to SLT because I ran into a problem related to the mass transfer ID when trying to create an entirely new object.  This new object was added in transaction LTMOM and assigned to the appropriate project and subproject.  Next, I created the source structures, assigned the source structures to the target structures, and mapped the source fields to the target fields.  Are you thinking that this sounds like LSMW?  Me, too!  Finally back in LTMC, I uploaded the data file.  The program failed to work and provided a very cryptic message to the effect that the new “object” was not assigned to the mass transfer ID.  There are a couple of notes in OSS that might be relevant so stay tuned.  The custom object that I was trying to create was one that would create material masters using an internal number range.  The object as provided in LTMC does not support that.  There is a happy ending to that particular effort: I was able modify the standard object and create a rule to retrieve the next number from the range using function module BAPI_MATERIAL_GETINTNUMBER.  I’ll describe that in more detail in another post.