Symptom
This note describes various restrictions & provides general information for SAP Mobile Asset Management 2.5 SR1.
Reason and Prerequisites
The current MAM release is only supported, if the related components (for example SAP R/3, NetWeaver stack, SAP Mobile Infrastructure, NSICom Crème, etc.) are supported. For more information please refer to the respective Product Availability Matrix (PAM) of the related components
Solution
Hardware Restrictions
The MAM 2.5 SR1 application runs on officially supported Mobile Infrastructure (MI) devices. Refer to the MI product availability matrix (PAM) in service market place for more details.
Barcode usage is only supported with devices that support barcode with the appropriate drivers installed on the devices.
RFID Reader: RFID devices from Psion (netpad with at least 128 MB RAM) are supported. Psion drivers that support the SAP RFID component are available for download at: http://www.psionteklogix.com. When Other vendor's devices become available, will be mentioned in the corresponding release note.
Software Restrictions
MAM application requires the installation of the Mobile Engine Clients at minimum: ME 2.1 SP03 Patch Level 01 or MI 2.5 SP10
The backend system required for this application must be 4.6B and above with PI2004.1 SP01.
Please note that these software restrictions change with later releases of MAM 2.5 (i.e. MAM 2.5 SR2), therefore, it is recommended to look at the release note of the release to be installed in your environment for the latest information on the appropriate ME patch level as well as the appropriate SP level for both the Web AS and the Plug in.
Performance related Information:
The MAM application has been tested for performance with a target user scenario as follows: The scenario includes 10 work orders on average per technician, with a minimum of 5 and a maximum of 30. Each order includes 1 business partner, 1 functional location, one notification, 5 operations, 1 equipment, 5 materials. Also, parts are needed to be available in the mobile inventory for each technician. Therefore, the average inventory count per user is 500 materials. In addition,there is the assumption that there is 1 measurement document that gets done on average per order. A service technician performs synchronization after completing 5 orders (that is, 25 operations) and downloads up to 5 newly assigned work orders with the above described characteristics. Synchronization takes place at least twice a day, once in the take place when a technician has completed 5 work orders. This scenario attempts to account for a representative number of work orders and synchronizations per day.
Performance of MAM 2.5 will differ depending on the devices and the Operating System (PPC 2002 vs. PPC 2003 vs WinCE vs Win32) used. The PDA devices that have been targeted for the performance tests above are PPC 2002 & PPC2003 based devices with 64 MB of RAM using a Strong ARM & XScale processors. PPC 2003 based devices with XScale processors have shown better than average performance improvement over PPC 2002 and therefore it is recommended for customers of MAM 2.0 and 2.5 to implement MAM using XScale devices that run PPC2003. The results of the performance tests are favorable.
Delta Information:
The MAM 2.5 SR1 application has the following functional enhancements:
RFID Management modified to support RFID tag enhancements (refer to note: 809355)
Classification data enhanced with search functionality
Technical object (EQ/FL) detail view enhanced to include:
address info
links and count of associated: orders, notification, warranties, contracts and measurement points
Order object list enhanced to include links to downloaded objects
MAM interfaces enhanced to support business logic for MAM components:
Notification Management
Technical Object Manangement
Measurement and Counter Reading
Order and Notification lists enhanced to include 2 additional columns listing with a link to the associated funct. location and/or equipment
Order list enhanced to include start date and time information
User View Manager (UVM) enhanced to organize lists by MAM components
Measurement document creation enhanced to include validation of upper and lower measurement point ranges
The MAM 2.5 SR1 application resolved the following list of MAM 2.5 SR0 limitations:
Technical objects begining with leading zeroes and with a subsequent dash (i.e. 00-B1) incorrectly have leading zeroes removed.
Planned material name and description not displayed if material is not in the inventory.
Downloaded material confirmations that are not associated to a planned material are not displayed in the material confirmation list.
Overflow readings on measurement points that don't contain previous measurement documents are incorrectly allowed.
Not possible to create measurement documents for measurement points that use valuation codes and has no numeric fields but CDSUF not set.
The text displayed in the Inventory list for equipment displays incorrect equipment text unlike the correct equipment text that is displayed during equipment install.
In partner determination on the client, partner role selection does not take into account the customizable valid partner roles per order type.
Limitations below fixed in MAM 2.5 SR1 HOTFIX1 (refer to note: 809356)
Incorrect handling of Notification mgmt ID values (refer to note 823153).
Incorrect handling of Notification mgmt catalogs (refer to note 823154).
Application error when when updating the number of lines for the UVM List of Components (refer to note 823155).
Incorrect handling of Notification mgmt long text (refer to note 823156)
Incorrect handling of Order mgmt long text (refer to note 823157)
Limitations below fixed in MAM 2.5 SR1 HOTFIX2 (refer to note: 827584)
Incorrect display of partner role data during navigation.
Additional Information:
The MAM 2.5 SR1 application has the following functional limitations:
Limitations due to pending fixes on MI 2.5 SP10 for multi-language
support (different language settings in application and middleware)
results in conflict errors on the middleware when performing the
following MAM client changes on technical objects:
Installing/uninstalling
User status activation/deactivation
Local inventory material update:
There might be an inconsistent state of inventory count in between synchronization. This situation should be fixed the next time the technician synchronizes after the material consumption documents get reflected in the technician inventory on the server.
Local inventory equipment update:
Cannot add a new entry to the inventory because inventory is not an upload object
Install/dismantle equipment:
Limitation of Smart sync local changes on downloaded sync bo data: Dismantling equipment will not result in updating the local inventory. This equipment will only be part of the inventory if the backend server returns a delta change.
Report functionality (Available for Orders Only):
This functionality provides a user with a display view of a single order and its related time/material confirmations. This report can be printed ONLY if the device Browser supports the Print functionality such as Win CE browser. Pocket IE does not support print. MAM delivers Work Order report with MAM 2.0(and higher). Printing order-related information will capture the order header info., as well as all the time and material confirmations related to the order and the logon user only. In addition, the order must have an R/3 order number assigned to it.
Application UI is designed for PDA's:
The application runs on PDAs, Laptops and tablet PCs, however the UI is optimized only for the PDA.
Error Handling:
Once an error message is returned from the R/3 to the middleware, then the middleware will remove the object from the client device associated with the error message. Then the user will be able to use the error log of MAM to view the error messages returned from the middleware. At this point, the user will decide whether to recreate/re-update that specific object. The user will also have to manually remove the log entries once he has processed the error. Further correction of the error occurred on the client can take place on the middleware side under the ME Monitor functionality.
Measurement Documents:
Since this is an upload only object, once documents are successfully posted to the R/3 system, then the middleware will automatically remove these documents from the client device. Users are notified only if errors occur with these documents and errors can be viewed in the Error Log.
User Statuses:
Only user statuses without status numbers will be supported by the backend in this release (statuses with check boxes). If user statuses with status numbers are used, then the client application will function incorrectly. Changes of downloaded orders are limited to user statuses only.
Catalog assignment in Notification processing:
Due to the limited space on a PDA, one catalog profile can be assigned to a notification type and if more than one catalog profile is required, BADI can be used to enhance the functionality.
Multi language support:
The MAM 2.5 SR1 application will support the following languages: DA, DE,EN, ES, FR, FI, JA, IT, NL, PT, SV, ZF and ZH.
It is important to note that the MAM user language will depend on the Mobile Engine Client language that is assigned to the user and therefore the appropriate language will be defaulted.
Text alignment of Double Byte characters for second level tabs does not display the characters in a single line.
Notification task longtext and task release flag:
If you modify an existing notification task longtext that was created from the backend system, synchronize the changes, then set the task release flag for this previously modified task longtext, these changes will not be sent to the middleware by the Mobile Engine synchronization process. If you modify this notification once more ,then the task release flag modification will be sent to the middleware along with the new modifications but this will result in a synchronization error on the client. This will be fixed in the near future.
RFID Management tag size:
The RFID tag size must be at least 256 bytes in memory (512 bytes for unicode)
Sync BO code generation: (mobile infrastructure limitation)
When enabling and generating the MAM 2.5 Sync BOs, the code is generated in the customer namespace starting with Z_MEREP_*****. Please take caution when creating Smart Sync related function modules with the same naming space. This will be fixed in the near future.