An Easy, Flexible Alternative to LSMW for Business Users

Uploading bulk information to SAP doesn’t have to be time consuming and complex. Rather than rely on SAP’s Legacy System Workbench (LSMW) which was designed for IT professionals for initial data migration projects from legacy systems, business users can leverage a non-technical alternative in a few simple steps to create and update data in SAP for everyday business transactions and data projects.  This white paper provides a side-by-side comparison of LSMW’s 14-step-process and Automate Studio’s 3-step process to upload and download data and highlights why Precisely Automate’s business-led, IT-enabled solution provides many benefits to the organization.

Data maintenance with LSMW

LSMW was originally created by SAP for IT teams to migrate data from nonSAP systems to SAP R/3, using csv files as the source to import legacy data. But historically, it has also been used for on-going data maintenance tasks to support the business, a purpose it was never intended for.

In many organizations running SAP ERP systems, LSMW has become the hammer that the IT department uses to nail every integration scenario that starts with data in a spreadsheet. This can become a problem not only for the end user, who completely relies on IT to create and run the LSMW scripts for them, but ultimately for everyone – auditors, the business, and in the end, even IT, as they end up spending a lot of time and effort on data upload tasks.

LSMW’s highly technical process to upload bulk information to SAP is time consuming and complex. Because LSMW typically requires developer-level authorizations, only a limited number of users has access to the tool to complete SAP data processes. The table below illustrates LSMW’s 14-step-process, although the process would be very similar for any master or transactional data process in SAP.

Read this whitepaper to learn more about how Automate Studio is a fast, easy alternative that allows business users to get up and running quickly from the Excel interface for faster data creation and process execution.