Describing Mass Activities

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
  • Understand Convergent Invoicing use of Mass Activities
  • Understand process steps in use of Mass Activities
  • Understand how to monitor Mass Activities

Use of Mass Activities in Convergent Invoicing

Lesson Overview

Mass Activities are used in FI-CA for parallelized job processing.

Business Example

Print Service Corporation has 600.000 Contract Accounts that are billed and invoiced at the end of the month. About 2 Million billable Items are billed and invoiced. Operations uses mass activities because the jobs can be parallelized in FI-CA in order to reduce runtime.

Mass Activities

What is a Mass Activity?

  • Business processes where large volumes of data are processed, such as the payment run or dunning run, are realized in Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable by mass activities.
  • Mass activities automatically split the dataset to be processed, such as a quantity of business partners or contract accounts, into several technical jobs and process them in parallel.
  • Advantages:
    • Parallelization of Jobs.
    • Fast and effective processing of big data volumes.
    • Same Framework for all mass activities.

With the mass activities of Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable you can split the data for processing over several jobs that the system then processes in parallel.

All mass activities have a uniform layout. You enter data on the following tab pages:

  • General Selections
  • Activity-Specific Selections
  • Technical Settings
  • Logs

Process Steps in the Use of Mass Activities

To Create a new Mass Activity

  1. Define a unique identifier for the mass activitiy. This unique identifier consists of Date ID and Identification.
  2. General Selection: Define data to be processed in run.
  3. Step Intervall creation:

    There are two ways how to create intervals:

    • Dynamic parallelization objects - intervals will be created during execution of mass activity
    • Statistic parallelization objects - report RFKKDI01 needs to be scheduled before execution of mass activity (daily)For each combination of Object and Variant a standard variant needs to be created.The size of an interval determines how many objects will be included in one interval.

    - No variant specified: 1 Interval

  4. Step: Define Technical Settings If required the programs are run in parallel. To execute several jobs at the same time (to synchronize them), enter the number of jobs required and interval allocation. Several jobs are then started simultaneously in one program run, each processing one of the intervals in parallel. You can divide the intervals according to different criteria. The split is controlled by variants in which you can specify the number and size of the intervals, and which key area each interval covers. The block size controls how many selected items are held in the main memory. If you want to run the program in parallel, either specify a target host and the number of jobs assigned, or specify several target hosts with the number of jobs assigned to each one. For parallel runs, you can also use automatic load distribution. This means that you specify a number of jobs that the system automatically distributes to the application servers available.
    • Select either Automatic Load Distribution or Explicit Load Distribution and specify the number of jobs and the target host.
    • Select a variant. The system proposes the block size.

    If the program run is to be executed by a single run (that is, not in parallel), you do not have to make any technical settings.

    You can create variants dependent on the parallelization object for the split into intervals. If dynamic interval creation is not supported for a mass activity, you can change the variants manually. If the underlying data changes frequently, you should regenerate the variants regularly to achieve an even interval distribution.

  5. Step: Logs: The job log records status information and any errors that occur during the program run. The application log contains business-relevant information. You can make the following additional settings for the application log:
    • Via a specification in the field Problem Class, you determine the importance that a message must have to be output in the application log
    • The expiry date specifies the earliest date on which the log expires. It can also influence the event in which the log is deleted. This is particularly relevant because from the application log, you can schedule jobs, and delete logs where the expiry date has been reached from the database.
    • The Hold until Expiry Date indicator prevents the log from being deleted before the expiry date specified.
    • The application logs are displayed in Enhanced Message Management (transaction EMMA). There you can create and monitor clarification cases for error messages.  
  6. Step: Schedule Mass Activity

    Choose the button Schedule Program Run.  In the dialog box that appears, you can choose between an immediate start in the background, a start in the background with specification of start date and time, or a start in the background via a job container of the job commander.

Monitoring of Mass Activities

Call Transaction ST13 and for the Tool name choose Mass_Man_Monitoring and EXECUTE.

Screenshot of the mass activities mass run analysis tool.

Within one screen you receive an overview of Start-/Endtime of each job, the overall duration the amount of Intervals and Jobs, as well as information about the performance: the Counter and the Throughput/hour.

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