There are some things you find in SAP that make you feel “That’s Wierd?”. One of such things I found this week:
Updating any Employee Name fields on Infotype 0002 will automatically update the Changed By (UNAME) and Changed On (AEDTM) fields on all Infotype 0001 records of that employee. Surprised? But that’s exactly how SAP designed it. When a user changes the contents of a First Name, Last Name and/or Middle Name fields, this triggers a change to the AEDTM and UNAME fields on IT0001. The reason for this is that there are two fields: P0001-SNAME (Sortable Name) and P0001-ENAME (Formatted Name of Employee) on Infotype 0001 that are part of standard SAP and are used in reports, interfaces and other programs. These two fields get updated with every single change done to the name fields on IT0002.
I found some useful information related to this topic –
A reasonable explanation from an SAP User is: “It is because IT0001 does not always get delimited/created/modified at the same time as a name change in IT 0002, SAP is setup to change all name fields in other infotypes to the new name even though it is future dated. That way SAP can ensure that the most recent name change is reflected through SAP in transactions like CATS and HR.”
Addressing a similar concern from another user, Martin Gillet who called this design “silly but standard”, suggested two options:
1/ Add a control table for the field ENAME in the structure P0001 (I don’t like to change the standard, unless it can be added in the CI_P0001)
2/ Use the user exit for HR Master Data and force the system to accept the previous value in the previous time record…. the user exit is HRPBAS01 (call it thru the tcode SMOD) (I would rather like this solution)
Lastly, I can tell you without a doubt that this design has never troubled me in any of my projects until now. So, in my opinion, as long as a customer turned on the Audit Log (T585*) on for IT0001 fields, they won’t have any trouble living with this logic!