This lesson is timely because I’m dealing with this issue right now at my current client. Their model uses class nodes in the bill of material VERY heavily, so we’ve been noticing awful performance in CU50. SAP does provide some solutions for variant configuration performance, take a look at the following note to get some additional ideas:
Note 917987 – General performance in variant configuration
Now, we have done a few things in an attempt to improve the performance. First, we were using class type 200 with a reference characteristic. I learned, for class nodes this is actually a no no, unless you check a box in configuration to redundantly store the characteristic value. Here’s what SAP’s help says about it:
Class Maintenance
Using Reference Characteristics Only
This constellation cannot access the database directly to read the assignment records. All classified objects are processed sequentially.
In order to change it, you must check that little box up top for redundant storage. Now the drawback of this approach is twice as many table entries. For that reason, we chose to move the characteristic to be NOT a reference cstic. The only issue this causes is that value for material number (in our case) will not be populated automatically. Not a huge deal.
Now, we changed all of that stuff, and still no change. this was disappointing. After some debugging, we (using transaction SE30 for performance tuning) we found that the issue was with table KSSK. Surprise, Surprise, it holds the class connections. So we handed it off to basis. They began by running statistics on all of the tables listed in the above OSS note. Still no help… finally, we needed basis to reorganize the tables and indexes for KSSK & INOB. This may sound like a lot of mumbo jumbo, but if you ask your basis person it will make sense to them =)
Short story is that sometimes you can get performance without changing your model. Now I don’t regret the changes we did, they will still be beneficial, but don’t forget about the technical aspects.
As always, if you need further help in variant configuration, please press the contact us button above and let us know how we can help,
thanks for reading,
Mike