Symptom
Timesheet postings to Financial Controlling (CO) are not being processed when the application job Process Unposted Time Confirmations is running.
Environment
SAP S/4HANA Cloud - All versions
Cause
The application job is locking all the users in the system for the entire duration for which the job is running. This blocks the CO postings from getting processed. The application job will lock all the users in the system if the number of users being processed is more than 100.
Resolution
In the application job Process Unposted Time Confirmations, a new parameter Max. No of Parallel Tasks has been introduced. When this value is determined, the application job will process the time entries parallelly. The Max. No of Parallel Tasks field will determine the maximum number of tasks that can processed at a given point of time, as a part of one single job.
Using the MAXLOCK field, the application job will only lock users for which parallel tasks are running at any given point of time. So instead of locking all the users, by default it will not lock more than the defined MAXLOCK value (Max. No. of Parallel Task.
Since the values of both MAXLOCK and Max. No. of Parallel Task can be changed, there is a trade-off. On one hand, lower values of MAXLOCK and Max. No. of Parallel Tasks will lock only a few users at a time and that in turn will block lesser number of time postings to CO. On the other hand, higher values of MAXLOCK and Max. No. of Parallel Tasks will process and lock higher number of users at a time. However, the amount of time taken for the job to complete will be reduced.
Limitations:
- When the application job runs in a parallel mode, the result displayed will be separate for each process and not combined.
- Application log will not be generated when the job runs in parallel mode.
- Parallelization is enabled only for the application job and not for Fiori application Process Unposted Time Confirmations.
- If the job is unable to lock the users or if the resources are not available, the time posting details of those few users will not be processed. They can be processed later by a subsequent job.
- Value for Max. No of Parallel Task should be less than 4 to avoid running into resource failures. It should have a value between 2 – 4. No value or a value of 1 will have the same behaviour as before.
- There is no consolidated log available when the application job runs in parallel mode.
- The MAXLOCK value is not configurable from the frontend. It can only be configured from the backend. The default value is 100. Hence, by default each parallel task will process not more than 100 users.
Keywords
KBA , CA-TS-S4 , Cross Application Timesheet in S/4HANA , Problem