[ZT] Important points of creating planning book

Question

From one SAP site:
Some hints on the design and usage of macros for background processing:
u2022 Create a separate planning book for each macro background job. The planning book should
contain only key figures used by the macro itself, and only macros executed as activities by
the mass-processing job. Use a different planning book whenever different key figures are
needed by two macros, and a different data view whenever the time periods are different.
u2022 Remove all unused macros from planning books associated with mass processing jobs, as
they are loaded in an unorganized manner which can be performance-intensive. Unused
macros are not helpful to your business process.
u2022 Only those macros that are called by an activity are executed in background. These activities
are: Start, End, Level change. Default macros are not executed automatically, as they are in
dialog. When defining a job, you must therefore first establish which start and default macros
have to be executed and in which sequence, so that your own self-defined macro can work
correctly. Macros for background should not involve actions like setting colors, hiding fields,
display icons, or sending popup windows that are frequently included in default macros for
online use.
u2022 The planning book used for background macros should have only the functionality it uses, i.e.
application demand planning and no other functionality.
u2022 For performance reasons, run macros for a delta period rather than the entire horizon
wherever possible. Under most circumstances, historical data is not changed, other than
adding new periods, one time bucket profile at a time. Rather than performing the full
calculation over a long historical period, run a macro to do this once, and then design a new
macro that only performs the calculation for the u201Cdeltau201D period, or the period that has just
entered the historical horizon.
u2022 If you want to speed up the processing in the APO releases 3.0A, 3.10 and SCM 4.0, you can
create several background jobs with roughly equal numbers of characteristic combinations
and run them in parallel. Make sure that no individual characteristic combination belongs to
more than one selection variant, as this can cause lock issues. For optimum performance the
selections for parallel processing should be roughly of the same size.
u2022 From release mySAP SCM 4.1 you can use parallel processing profiles for running macros,
e.g. for the adjustment of historical data. You can navigate from transaction /SAPAPO/MC8E
directly to the maintenance of parallel processing profiles or start transaction
/SAPAPO/SDP_PAR for direct access. After defining block size and number of maximum
parallel processes you have to assign the parallel processing profile to the selection variant.
The next time you run this selection as background job it will automatically run with parallel
processing.
u2022 If you need to run two macros on the same key figures with the same level of aggregation, put
both into one planning book and execute them as two actions within the same background
activity (defined with transaction /SAPAPO/MC8T, see below). You thus save the time needed
for loading the data for a second time.

Answer 1

This explanation sounds very good. I think this is a very first things that we face while implementing.
Thanks for posting this.
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