Saving Time Safely?
We have used the MASSD transaction on several occasions and were impressed with its time saving features for making changes to large areas of master data. However, something we had not considered is whether this transaction is actually dangerous. Any transaction that give the configurater this type of power is certainly a concern if it is used improperly. However, we found an interesting take on the topic from the book SAP SCM by Daniel Wood.
We have heard from many quarters not so much that MASSD is buggy, but that it is dangerous. It is a transaction that is applied to make mass changes to whole swaths of master data without being troubled with the necessity of individually investigating each change-case. Of course, it may be a master data manager’s job to investigate each use case when making mass changes, but we nonetheless face the inescpable fact that angelic beings are in very short supply in the labor market…. It is nice to have a feature like MASSD when all one wants to do is change a setting, from P to S on 500 products. Nonetheless it seems to easy for some users to include products on their change lists that they did not notice or intend. Alternatively, it also sometimes occurs to users that will make a small, unintended change — or even a small change that was intended by not carefully thought out — but to 500 or 1000 cases.
Our Take
We think Daniel raises some excellent points. For ourselves, we will continue to use MASSD, however, we recommend using it in conjunction with simulation versions. Changes should not be made on the active version in any case, but should be run through a simulation version for several planning cycles to check the output.
