Shipa,
Thanks for your suggestions. Thanks for taking the time to help.
I was able to resolve these issues using the following steps in our sandbox/test environments. I have also included other problems I faced in material ledger month end closing steps for the benefit of readers.
**** Caution: Do not do the following steps in production environment. You will destroy your production data irretrievably. Material Ledger is unforgiving!!! ***
1. For the materials with "Internal Error in Form/Function etc issue, I performed a CKMM in the respective plants changing for 3S to 2S and then did the same in reverse (2S to 3S). Then ran the ML close. This seems to have temporarily solved the problem.
2. I was also getting a short dump -- either during MMPV or during period close in the cockpit. The message at both times was "Error in MLCCS ...". I realized it related to Cost Component Split. I identified the company codes of the materials that caused the errors, then got all the plants within each of these company codes. I ran MLCCS_RESET and then MLCCS_Startup in SE38. Then ran MMPV/ML Close. This seems to have resolved the issues at least temporarily.
3. Occasionally I noticed some "material valuation is inconsistent in valuation area xxxx" error. I executed steps 1 and 2 above in succession. This seems to have resolved the issue temporarily.
4. There was also the issue of "duplicate entry in CKMLKEV" while performing Single/Multi-Level steps in the closing cockpit. This pointed to MLCCS. So I ran step 2 above. Again this seems to have fixed the issue temporarily.
I was able to accomplish all of these using the steps above because these were in our test environments. The reasons as to why these happened are manifold:
- MMPV was not carried out for a long, long, long time in certain plants within a company code. When ML is active, it is necessary to close previous period. In cases where MMPV was not carried out for a long time, I ran CKMHELP program to set the material status to 70 for the immediately preceding posting period. This helped run the ML cockpit for the current/previous periods.
- Users were processing too many transactions with unrealistically large quantities and prices resulting in overflow errors. I carried out reversal of movements for each process category to reduce the inventory balances to reasonable quantities, and ran MR21 to set the prices correctly. This helped resolve the overflow issue.
- Reckless, repeated running of CKMM and MLCCS_Reset/MLCCS_Startup also contributed to these problems. Every time a standard had to be released, but the material status in ML is "30-Quantities and Values entered", would prevent users from doing that. So they resort to CKMM and then reset status using CKMHELP program to set the status to 10 and then release the new cost. It works, but wreaks havoc on ML as a whole eventually.
Hope my comments are useful for some!!!
Cheers,
TD