The persistent relevance of LSMW

Despite being 17 years old and having the look and feel of an old R/3 report, LSMW is still used by millions of business professionals every day, but there are whispers of obsolescence from a tiny minority. The only problem with a conclusion of obsolescence is that is LSMW enjoys 100% target market penetration; all SAP customers have it.

An increasingly-large host of vendors promise an alternative to LSMW that is better, but few come even close in terms of functionality and none come close to the price. Many of these alternatives promise to eliminate the need for programmers by making the process simple and that works as well as trying to eliminate doctors from an operating room by making surgery simpler.

Disclaimer: Unlike all the other content on this website, this article deals with opinions and is peppered with analogies. The purpose of this article is to dispel misconceptions about LSMW the way somebody might talk to a friend who had decided to vote for one candidate in the 2016 presidential election only because the other candidate was so bad.

LSMW isn't simple.

Many of the 3rd Party products providing a path between Excel and SAP are simple, but it's the sort of simple that makes Apple the preferred brand for Liberal Arts majors while Computer Science majors are drawn to PC and Android. In the same way, "simple" is a euphemism for limited features and LSMW isn't the real competition for these vendors.

"Yeah, but LSMW wasn't designed for mass uploads!"

The original role of LSMW was to migrate data from legacy systems--it's right there in the name! That doesn't stop business professionals from returning to it like a security blanket when performing straightforward mass uploads despite the fact that the MASS transaction (or any number of secretive and esoteric mass upload programs bundled with SAP) is simpler and actually designed for mass uploads--especially when access to the requisite mass transaction has not been granted!

For complicated mass uploads--especially for data from legacy systems--LSMW is still the choice of SAP professionals. The 3rd Party vendors might make it seem like their products compete with LSMW, but in reality, they are in competition with transactions like MASS, F.80 and KS12N. Many of the mass upload programs included with SAP can be found by searching the text field of the TSTCT table for *Mass*.

The claim that LSMW is obsolete because it is being used for something other than the purpose for which it was originally intended is like claiming that a screwdriver is obsolete because it is used to open a paint can. There is a tool specifically designed to open paint cans, but few workmen will throw away their screwdrivers in order to justify the purchase of that tool.

Functionality by virtue of origin

LSMW has an unfair advantage because it is written in native ABAP. By accepting snippets of code, LSMW can natively access functions and natively execute SQL queries in a way that 3rd Party solutions cannot. There are plenty of solutions for extracting table data to be manipulated, transformed or reported externally to SAP, but for on-the-fly validation and reporting, only ABAP will do.

Virtue by origin of functionality

At the time of writing, this programmer is on a project for a multi-national organization that has outsourced its BASIS to one of the Big 4 firms. That means the development of a simple report takes 15 minutes of programming, 2 days of documentation and a requirement to jump through more hoops than one might find at a Tina Turner lookalike contest. It also adds around USD1000 in bureaucratic overhead in addition to what they pay for 15 minutes of my time.

With LSMW, I can produce the same results in minutes instead of days. When a client wants an additional column or some small tweak, a few more minutes of effort is sufficient whereas a trip back to SE38 costs the same few minutes in addition to two more days of documentation sprinkled liberally with unnecessary, costly bureaucracy.

The only drawback is that my normal users cannot use the LSMW object without minimal permissions, whereas a traditional report with its own transaction code can be accessed by any user. In the past, management has gotten read access for users. Here the clients are content to hand off the requirements and have me run the report.

Okay, there are some competitors . . .

Located elsewhere on this website is a suite of recyclable VBA code that comprises Saplicity. Included on the Saplicity page are training videos, sample code and simple canned Excel tools designed to automate data loads into SAP using only Excel and SAPGUI.

Saplicity isn't meant to replace LSMW or the various mass load transactions included with SAP. It is a great option to give functional resources the ability to automate changes to SAP data.

Click this link to find out more about this free suite of recyclable VBA code. It does everything that the competitors' products do, but costs nothing and requires only rudimentary VBA skills to create or customize tools.

Alternatively, calling BAPIs directly from Excel or Access using VBA can be a great way to extract data from SAP and to perform data uploads. Find more about running BAPIs from VBA as an alternative to LSMW.

S4 comes with the Legacy Transfer Migration Cockpit or LTMC. It also is used to call BAPIs as explained in this article, but isn't much good for maintaining SAP data that is not directly accessible by BAPI.

No obsolescence, perceived or real

LSMW is going to remain relevant so long as SAP does. In fact, with systems like MDG further obfuscating the inner workings of SAP and making updates more complex and more cumbersome, LSMW will likely see even more use in the coming years.