SAP ECC Knowledge Base

Product and Customer Indexing Strategies

Sana uses the Product import task in Sana Admin to retrieve material (product) data from SAP ECC to build and update the catalog of a webstore, and the Customer Import  task to retrieve and update customer information.. Material data from SAP ECC that is indexed by Sana is also used for webstore search, sorting and filtering of products, product sets configuration and product specifications.

Using Webstore Catalog Overview in SAP ECC, you can simulate webstore behavior - see an overview of all materials, their prices, stock, units of measure, last modified date of materials, materials orderability and visibility. Webstore Catalog Overview is also used to manage materials visibility. Only those materials that are marked as visible in SAP ECC are indexed by Sana and shown in the webstore.

Using Webstore Customers Overview in SAP ECC, you can see all your consumers, business customers, prospects and guest accounts. If you have multiple webstores assigned to different sales areas, you can also see customers for each webstore.

If you need to change some data of a large number of materials or customers in SAP ECC at once, it can take a lot of time for Sana to update the product or customer index. One of the main reasons of this is that Sana for SAP ECC uses the standard SAP table CDHDR to retrieve information about material changes when indexing products and customers. This is the indexing strategy that Sana uses by default.

Sana for SAP ECC has three indexing strategies which can be tested on a customer's environment to find the most suitable one, if you encounter performance issues with product and customer indexing.

You can change the indexing strategy in the Webstore Optimization window in SAP. You can access Webstore Optimization either from the main window of the Sana Commerce solution (/n/sanaecom/webstore), or by calling the transaction /n/sanaecom/optimize.

• SAP - the default indexing strategy which retrieves product and customer changes directly from the standard SAP table CDHDR.
• SANA - copies product and customer changes from the standard SAP table CDHDR to the custom Sana table. Sana checks product and customer changes not in the standard SAP table CDHDR but in the custom table. You can schedule a background job for how long the product and customer changes must be stored in the custom Sana table and clean up the history automatically.
• Native - retrieves product and customer changes from the database view. You can create a view in your SAP database to store product and customer changes there. In this case direct database calls are made to retrieve product and customer changes from the database view which improves performance.

We recommend using the default SAP indexing strategy. If you encounter some performance issues with product and customer indexing, first we recommend to consider the actions listed below to improve indexing performance of the SAP indexing strategy.

1. Create an index for the UDATE and UTIME fields of the CDHDR table. Contact your Sana project manager or Sana partner for more details.
2. Implement a BADI. Contact your Sana project manager or Sana partner for more details.
3. Reduce the number of records in the CDHDR table.
4. Increase system resources.

For more information about indexing strategies, see "Improve Indexing Performance".