.In this u explain what purpose u need it. 2.

what is logic required for achieving the end result 3.What are the tables and fields which has to taken into consideration. 1.Forms-Purchase order,Sales order,delivery note,order confirmation,good receipt 2.Reports-If new reports are required functional spec has to be given with the table & Field names 3.Interface-In this if u have third party system it has to be linked with SAP to bring the data into SAP (e-g-Barcoding). 4.Workflow-(e-g)To specify when the print procedure starts, you define a triggering event. To specify how a document is printed, you define a standard task. To specify which document is printed, and the circumstances under which the document is printed, you use the workflow definition to formulate complex rules. 5.Enhancements allow you to add additional functions to the SAP standard. 6.Conversion-Is nothing but like converting PO into PDF format & converting the dat from standard SAP to excel sheets etc.

What is RICEF?
What is RICEF? This is not an interview question! You can see RICEF acronym, when you look at the most SAP ABAP Developer job position descriptions; and you can sometimes encounter RICE version of it. So what does RICEF stand for? Firstly lets look at some SAP job posting examples: Able to scope, review, and create SD RICEF MM RICEF Functional Spec Exp Must have experience supervising a team and writing RICEF Must be very proficient in all aspects of RICEF developments Interact with business users to analyze the requirements and technical desings of the RICEF objects Develops functional specifications for RICEF technical objects affecting respective business processes

RICEF is not a standard SAP acronym! Is there anyone knows who made RICEF acronym firstly? All right, RICEF stands for Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Enhancements, Forms. R - Reports R refers report programming. Of course, firstly classical report programming, WRITE statement; then it means ALV programming with either ALV function modules or ABAP objects. I - Interfaces Interfaces are ALE / IDOC developments. Not only development, ABAP programming for IDOCs, also IDOC customization, management. I think it might refers EDI too. C - Conversion I think conversions means BDC programming, batch input function modules, BDCDATA structure, CALL TRANSACTION. Maybe conversion specifically refers conversion programs for standard batch input programs. Even we can say it refers LSMW. E - Enhancements Enhancements are user-exits and the object oriented model of user-exits that is BADIs. F - Forms Forms are SAPscript forms, SAPscript print programs, and SmartForms.

To speak at macro level that is at projet manager or at senior levels. The Functional Spec (Specification) which is a comprehensive document is created after the (SRS) Software Requirements Document. It provides more details on selected items originally described in the Software Requirements Template. Elsewhre organizations combine these two documents into a single document. The Functional Specification describes the features of the desired functinality.. It describes the product's features as seen by the stake holders,and contains the technical information and the data needed for the design and developement. The Functional Specification defines what the functionality will be of a particulat area that is to be precise a transaction in SAP terminology. The Functional Specification document to create a detailed design document that explains in detail how the software will be designed and developed. The functional specification translates the Software Requirements template into a technical description which

a) Ensures that the product feature requirements are correctly understood before moving into the next step, that is detchnical developement process. b) Clearly and unambiguously provides all the information necessary for the technical consultants to develop the objects. At the consultant level the functional spects are preapred by functinal consultants on any functionality for the purpose of getting the same functinality designed by the technical pepole as most of the times the functionalities according to the requirements of the clients are not available on ready made basis. Let me throw some light on documentation which is prepared before and in a project: 1) Templates 2) Heat Analysis 3) Fit Gap or Gap Analysis 4) Business Process Design 5) Business Process Model 6) Business Change & Impact 7) Configuration Design, which is just 5 % of Total SAP- have different names 8) Future Impact & Change Assessement 9) Functional Design (Module Wise) 10) Risk Assessement 11) Process Metrics and Many More-- Which has impact on Business and its work flow Note * This documents are preapared in Vanilla SAP Standards -- Things differ from one implementation to another, and it always depends on the type of business which is opting for SAP.

RICEF Objects on SAP Projects

RICEF represents the development objects that need to be designed and built on a SAP implementation to meet the business requirements. RICEF is an acronym for Reports, Interfaces, Conversion, Enhancements and Forms respectively. It has also been referred as FRICE or RICEFW (with W for SAP Workflow). Traditionally "Reports" in RICEF used to represent ABAP reports (ALV, Batch, simple output or interactive) but with the addition of BI and Business Objects, SAP customers have been including these transactional and analytical reports also as Reports. Same applies for "Interfaces" in RICEF. It used to represent SAP interface technologies such as ALE, IDOC, etc but now a days SAP systems integrators include external as well as internal SAP and non-SAP system interfaces to avoid confusion for the SAP customer. The output of the project blueprint phase is the SAP Solution Inventory which comprises of the RICEF objects together with configuration

items. It is very important to understand each solution gap and properly classify the same as either a report, interface, conversion object, enhancement, form or a workflow.

Reports
Reports can include classic ABAP programs that produces simple output or ABAP programs with complex interactive user interface via ALV programming or other modern techniques. These reports may be triggered using a custom transaction code, ABAP Editor (se38), ABAP Workbench (transaction se80) or via a background job.

Consider enhancing the standard delivered SAP reports versus building new reports from scratch. If you are developing multiple reports with similarities, then consider building one robust report with dynamic APIs and different report variants to avoid duplication of design and build effort. We recommend that you keep the ABAP reports separate from the SAP BI operational and analytical reports. SAP Project Manager & RICEF Development Manager: Reports can be designed and built by ABAP developers who are not experienced in specific SAP modules client is implementing. This may help you balance your ABAP resources well and reserve the more knowledgeable senior resources for enhancements which most often requires expertise with the SAP module. Assign simple reports to junior developers and have your senior ABAP developers work on reports that have complex user interface, processing logic or heavy on data processing which may require heavy focus on architecture and performance.

Interfaces
Interface includes all the development and configuration objects that allows internal as well as external SAP and non-SAP systems to communicate with each other. What gets included in the RICEF inventory has evolved over time. Originally it used to be in strict ABAP context which included ALE, IDOC, EDI and RFC enabled communications. Nowadays with evolution of SAP PI over the years and to avoid terminology confusion for a SAP customer, all the SAP systems integration including e-SOA (Service Enabled Architecture) communication, third party / external systems integration, web interfaces, etc that are managed by SAP PI are counted as RICEF interface objects.

Take into consideration all external systems that use a single business process within ECC system so that effort to re-engineer and redesign the backend operation is minimized. Data volume also plays a major role in deciding the interface type and its design for optimal performance. During the blueprint you should meet with the business SME and understand the normal data volume as well as peak volumes. Remember that we are deploying the SAP system to support business growth and as such data volume projection for 10-15 years into the future should be considered. Any changes to an interface or underlying business process should be followed by thorough end-to-end testing of entire interface to ensure that output, performance and data handling still adhere to the design. SAP Project Manager & SAP PI Lead: On most projects now a days the systems integration (PI) work is mostly outsourced. Ensure that you have senior SAP PI architects working onsite directly with the client SME. Blueprint requirements gathering work should definitely be done at customer location. We highly recommend that these onsite PI architects and senior consultants design the large and complex interfaces by directly working with business teams. The build and testing can be assigned to the offshore team with at least 1:5 ratio between senior PI architect and consultants. This will ensure that business gets a quality product and you have the best resources from SI working directly with the client while maintaining the cost effectiveness using the offshore model.

Conversion
Here we include all SAP Data Conversion objects which are required to load the data from client legacy systems into your future state SAP system. It includes ABAP development and configuration tasks with SAP tools and technologies that support data conversion like BDC programming, Direct Input (DI) programs, LSMW (Legacy System Migration Workbench), Complex ABAP program to support data load, Transfer Workbench, BAPI, etc. Building a data conversion strategy, data extraction and cleansing plan are not included in the RICEF inventory and should be addressed separately on the SAP project by your Data Conversion Lead.

Some systems integrators (and outsourced vendors) build simple ABAP programs to load legacy directly into SAP database tables with direct inserts and updates. DO NOT LOAD DATA DIRECTLY INTO SAP DATABASE (DDIC). Because the data from your legacy system should systematically enter the SAP system as if the user was manually

entering it using the standard SAP transactions. All business and user input validations need to occur before the data is successfully committed to the database. We recommend that you have a RICEF lead representing the SAP customer who will periodically review the data load programs and strategies to avoid unforeseen issues during business migration. SAP Project Manager & SAP Data Conversion Lead: Make sure your project work plan includes prototyping of data loads in the sandbox to validate the cleansing of data extracted from legacy system. Most likely you will be able to use standard APIs or ABAP classes to create or modify the business objects that you need to load. Some of these objects may have been built as RICEF enhancements. Make sure you reuse them before building from scratch. Define milestones and dependencies between legacy data extraction, transformation, prototype, trial loads and final loads.

Enhancements
Enhancements include all modifications to SAP standard delivered package components such as the user interface, system processes and output to meet business requirements of an SAP customer. Modifications to standard delivered business processes are most often implemented using user exits or business add-ins (BADI). Sometimes enhancements can include custom developed stand alone transactions or business processes. On projects where custom developed SAP solution scope (includes new DDIC, application layer and UI) is significant, a new work stream dedicated to SAP Custom Development may be introduced. Otherwise custom development objects can be included as enhancements.

SAP Project Manager & SAP RICEF Lead need to make sure that you have a well balanced team of ABAP developers working on enhancements. Architects and senior developers must have prior experience with specific modules implemented on the project as it is very important that they have sound expertise about all available user exits, BADIs, DDIC objects, etc that can be enhanced. The complex enhancements should be designed and developed by senior SAP ABAP developers. If using a offshore model, you project should have at least 1:4 ratio between these senior developers/architects and other ABAP resources. At least a third of these architects should be present onsite to effectively communicate and work with the business teams.

Forms
Forms refer to structured data that needs to be presented as output which are standardized by the business or by external regulatory entities. Forms that are required for business operations include invoices, purchase orders, policies, etc. External forms that an SAP customer may need to adopt include compliance reports, tax filing forms, state regulatory reports, etc. Forms can be built using SAPscript, Smart Forms, Adobe Forms (also Adobe Interactive Forms) or MS Office Integration. In the recent years, Adobe forms and MS Office Integration forms are becoming more popular because both are user friendly (easy to create), easy printing capabilities and both are integrated with the ABAP workbench.

On almost every SAP project we have seen set of forms which comprise of 80% common data with 20% variation depending on the recipient or business context. Systems integrator often double count these objects there by increasing your project estimates. I recommend that one form should be counted as complex object that will include the processing logic and layout which will be used as basis for other variations. All other forms should be counted as very low, low or medium complexity depending on modifications to layout and processing logic. SAP RICEF Lead should be concious of the types of forms that will be implemented on your project. Analyze the types of forms that will be implemented as quickly as possible during the blueprint as you will need to onboard ABAP developers and technical consultants with experience in either SAPscript, Smart Forms, Adobe Forms or MS OI. Make sure you have developers who have prior experience with specific forms. 1:5 is a good ratio between Architect and developers working on RICEF Forms.