Create a Popup Message on Master Data

In SAP, there is a way to make a popup specific to a Master Data record appear during the posting of many documents. It isn't perfect, but it can be useful as a reminder to customer service representatives when posting new Sales Orders, Shipping Orders or Billing documents.

A great way to gracefully sunset Master Data that is a duplicate of another record is by creating a message that appears as a popup while posting new documents. If the message explains that the Master Data record is a duplicate and requests that the user transact through a Master Data record that has been identified as the survivor then any open transactional documents will eventually settle and the Master Data record can be sunset.

This example throws a sales text popup when using the Customer Master as the Sold-To in a new Sales Order. Start by launching the SE75 transaction and changing the "Text Objects and IDs".

Next, scroll down and double click on KNVV for "Customer texts, sales" and then click the "New" button. Populate the Text ID and Description and then click the "Save" button to create the new Sales Text object.

Launch the VOTXN transaction, click the Sales and Distribution radio button and then click the "Change" button. Select the existing Text Procedure and then double-click on "Text ID's in Textprocedure" to edit the Text IDs.

Click the "New Entries" button and then add the Text ID that was just created. The sequence simply orders the text determination logically with the highest number coming last.

The next step is to populate the long texts in the Customer Masters. This can be done manually or with an LSMW object that automates the process.

The process for handling Material Masters is similar, but requires an extra step whereby the text will be displayed during copy. This whitepaper is meant only to be a very basic primer, so a little experimentation may be required in a sandbox system.

Vendor Masters are likely just as easy, but it is unclear how to make the message popup when posting new Purchase Orders and Accounts Payables. Likely, it is in SPRO at this path, but unlike the popups listed above, this has not been tested.
SPRO → MM → Purchasing → Purchase Order → Texts for Purchase Orders → Define Text Types for Header Texts