EQKT table — Equipment Short Text Table

Each row in EQKT is the short description text of one piece of equipment, in one language. Equipment master data in SAP separates the technical and organizational attributes, held in EQUI and EQUZ, from the free-text description, which is held separately so it can exist in multiple languages without duplicating the whole master record. When a technician or planner enters or changes the equipment description on the basic data screen of IE01 or IE02, that text is written to EQKT against the logon language, not into EQUI. If a translation exists for another language, a second row appears for the same equipment number with a different language key. If no translation was ever entered, the description simply does not exist in that language and reports run in that language show a blank text.

MANDT is the client field, restrict on the working client first as with any master data table. EQUNR is the primary selectivity field, and any extract against EQKT should be scoped by a list of equipment numbers rather than run open. The field that catches people out is SPRAS: without restricting on it, a report that joins EQKT to EQUI returns one row per language per equipment, silently multiplying the result set and producing what looks like duplicate equipment lines. Always filter SPRAS to the session language, or explicitly to the language the report is meant to display, before drawing conclusions from row counts.

Symptom: the equipment description shown in a French-language session is blank even though the equipment clearly has an English description in IE03. Selection: read EQKT for the equipment number with SPRAS equal to 'F'. If no row comes back, the translation was never entered, this is expected behavior, not a data error. If a row exists with an empty EQKTX, the translation was created but never populated, which points at a data load or migration gap rather than a system defect.

EQKT continues to exist as a standard transparent table in S/4HANA and is populated by the same equipment master transactions as in ECC. There is no widely known compatibility view or replacement specifically for this text table, unlike some classification and pricing tables that were rebuilt on CDS. Consultants working with the Fiori equipment apps will see the same description field sourced from this table underneath, even though the presentation layer has changed.

Questions about what description text is stored, or why a translation is missing, belong to whoever owns equipment master data governance on the PM side, typically the functional consultant or master data steward maintaining IE01/IE02. Bulk translation loads or mismatches after a data migration are a migration team issue, not a Basis or ABAP issue, since the table itself has no technical constraint being violated.

EQUI holds the equipment master record itself and is the natural join partner for any report using EQKT. EQUZ carries the time-dependent equipment data such as installation location and functional location assignment over a validity period. IFLOTX is the equivalent short-text table for functional locations, following the same one-row-per-language pattern. ILOA holds the installation location data referenced by both equipment and functional location records. IE01, IE02 and IE03 are the transactions that write and read EQKT directly through the equipment master screens.