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. See also SAP Note 607797 (Job Control for Mass Activities: FAQ).
Process Flow
All mass activities have a uniform layout. You enter data on the following tab pages:
●General Selections
●Activity-Specific Selections
●Technical Settings
●Logs
On the tab page Technical Settings, you can decide whether you want automatic load distribution by the system, where you only define the number of jobs, or explicit load distribution where you explicitly specify how many jobs are to run on which hosts. For more information about the entries on the individual tab pages, see Functions for Scheduling Program Runs. Once you have made all of the entries required to execute the business process, you can schedule the program run. You can choose between immediate processing in the background or processing on a specific date. If you use the job container, you can also select the containers available. During the processing of the data, the system distributes the dataset to be processed to several parallel jobs automatically. The details for distributing the keys for the parallel objects are stored in variants that you have to update periodically. For example, you can create a variant for the business partners that splits the business partner set to be processed into 1,000 equal intervals. During parallel processing, the system makes sure that the processes do not block each other because of changing accesses to the same database resources, which could be the case, for example, in the assignment of document numbers or the update of transaction figures.
A payment run for all business partners starts several processes (for example, 10) that process the intervals created automatically one after the other. When the processing is completed for an interval, the system processes the next free interval. If all intervals have been processed, and therefore all technical jobs completed, the business task also receives the status Completed.
You can schedule the parallel interval jobs of the mass activities, execute them in a specific order, and monitor them using the following tools:
●Job Commander of Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable
●Own programs For instructions on how to proceed, see SAP Note 402886.
With the module FKJO_SCHEDULE, you can also schedule mass activity runs by RFC (see SAP Note 402886).
If an interval cannot be processed in a payment run, interest run, or interest calculation run for cash security deposits because the data is locked by another processing function, the system can restart the processing of this interval automatically and as frequently as required. You have to enter the maximum number of repetitions in the field Maximum Int.Repetitions in the specifications for General Control on the tab page Job Control under Technical Settings→ Prepare Mass Activities in the Implementation Guide for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable.
In all mass activities, the system checks the authorizations for authorization object F_KKMA that checks the authorization for the mass activity via the mass activity type. The processing of the variants is protected by the authorization object F_KKVARI (see the documentation for the authorization objects).
You can improve the performance of mass activities through settings in Customizing, such as activating the business partner shadow table. To do this, in the Implementation Guide for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable choose Technical Settings→ Activate Performance Improvement for Mass Runs. Read the documentation for the activity and the individual fields.
In the Implementation Guide for Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable under Technical Settings→ Create Interval Variants for Parallel Processes, you can maintain interval variants for parallelization (see activity documentation).
Job Commander