SAP Community - Situation Handling

Inviting You: Register to model your own Situation Handling use case in SAP S/4HANA with an expert

2023-02-21T21:58:46+01:00

You may be familiar with issues that repeatedly impact your business, such as delayed deliveries, expiring contracts, or pending confirmations and approvals. You can improve your business processes significantly by automatically alerting the right users about them in time and by proposing follow-up actions.

Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA offers you a wide range of predefined use cases with the standard framework.

If you have further business requirements, you can create your own Situation Handling use cases with the extended framework. For example, you can help project managers avoid project delays by notifying them about pending resource requests. Check out this blog post for more details.

You want to learn more about creating your own Situation Handling use cases?

Register for our upcoming Customer Engagement Initiative (CEI), focused on the extended framework of Situation Handling, by March 10, 2023.

Create Situation Handling use cases to automatically alert users about urgent business issues in SAP S/4HANA

What’s in it for you?

You have the opportunity to learn best practices directly from the Situation Handling Product Management and Development team:

See how to create custom use cases that are relevant for your business.

Take the chance to share feedback with us on your experience modeling own situations.

Learn more about the engagement initiative and the past project of the Situation Handling team in this blog post.

What are the prerequisites?

To engage successfully, you need the following system setup:

You are live on SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS2 or higher and use SAP Fiori launchpad.

These scope items have been activated in your test system:

- Situation Handling (31N)
- Responsibility Management (1NJ)

Join us in this initiative and kick off your custom Situation Handling use cases in SAP S/4HANA! We’re looking forward to working with you!

Want to learn more?

SAP Help Portal: Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA

SAP Community: Introduction to the Extended Framework of Situation Handling

SAP Community Call on March 27, 2023 – Your Journey to the Intelligent and Sustainable Enterprise with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition

2023-03-03T18:33:17+01:00

As part of this month's spotlight topic in SAP Community, we are hosting a community call on the intelligent ERP on 🗓️ March 27, 2023 at 4:00 p.m. CET!

Join yannick.peterschmitt, gerhard.welker, syedtalalhussain, and myself live on YouTube to get product expert insights into the latest features from the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2302 release. We will share how technologies leveraging artificial intelligence, machine learning, situation handling technology, and more support your individual journey to the intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

We are looking forward to welcoming you to our call on March 27, 2023 at 4:00 p.m. CET.
Register now for a special opportunity to ask your questions directly to the product experts!

See you on YouTube! 🙂

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast

I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and customers to address objects of interest by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we share all ingredients with you to get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA project a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge.

openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA

Our openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA offer an exciting new learning opportunity. What began with a small batch of 20 videos, has now become a channel with more than 50 microlearnings that have generated over 20,000 views since then. Today we cover multiple lines of business such as finance, manufacturing, and supply chain, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, extensibility, SAP User Experience, and upgrade management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to the SAP S/4HANA channel, so make sure you check them out.

Your Voice Matters!

If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Community–now fully integrated with SAP Community. The community brings together customers, partners, and SAP experts and has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Community ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and connect with experts to guide you through your journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

More Information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition:

'Welcome to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition in SAP Community' blog post here

'Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition 2302 Release' blog post here

'SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition 2302 Intelligent ERP Update' blog post here

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition release info here

Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition release blog posts here and previous release highlights here

Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist

SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Early Release Series here

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here

openSAP Microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here

Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition here

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Community: here

Feature Scope Description here

What’s New here

Help Portal Product Page here

Feel free to ask your questions on SAP Community here. Follow the SAP S/4HANA Cloud tag to stay up to date with the latest blog posts.

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, and myself via maria.silipo, LinkedIn or Twitter.

When Do Situations Occur and How to Handle and Automate it.

2023-06-25T12:37:03+02:00

Situation Handling is SAP S/4HANA functionality provided to bring certain settings (situations) to the attention of a relevant group of business users. This allows for proactive notification to the needed users for a situation that has occurred. Situations may be seen as problems or chances.

Business users are given the notification of a situation, together with the notification status (Open, Resolved, Obsolete, Invalid), contextual information relating to the object pertaining to the situation and lastly, any actions deemed necessary to address the situation. Situation Handling conveys the crucial and appropriate information to the attention of the business users.

Figure 1: Process Flow of the Situation Scenario

With SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 you can create your own situation use cases with the extended framework for Situation Handling. The extended framework offers three new configuration apps: The extended framework also contains an enhanced end-user app, My Situation- Extended, and the Situation Handing Demo app. You use the demo app to manage the flights of a fictional booking portal and to trigger situations based on pre-delivered configuration samples.

Manage Situation Object:

In this application, we can model business objects that enable Situation Handling. A situation object connects existing application artefacts such as CDS views, events, and actions that form the foundation to set up situation use cases. Model business objects that enable Situation Handling, including the events that trigger a situation.

Manage Situation Scenario:

In this app, you can model your own situation scenarios for extended object-based situations. That is, situations that occur for a specific business object, such as a contract. A situation scenario is the technical description of a business scenario and provides the foundation for defining multiple use cases in the form of situation templates, which serve as blueprints for situation types. The business object affected by a situation is defined as the anchor object. In the app, you define the anchor object and add all objects that could trigger situations for the anchor object. For the trigger objects, you define the trigger events and the actions that help the users resolve the situations. And you define which information is displayed in the My Situation - Extended app to the users responsible for solving situations based on this scenario.

Manage Situation Extended:

In this application, you can create situation templates as blueprints for business cases. It can also create situation types for productive use. You could manage instances here and collect the message-based situation which is supposed to be triggered.

Situation Handling Demo:

This app contains test data you can use to explore the extended framework of Situation Handling. This is a simplified version of a booking portal focusing on actions for flights and bookings. After defining and enabling a situation type, you can use the app's actions to trigger situations.

My Situations – Extended:

With this app, you can display all situations in your area of responsibility, based on the extended framework of Situation Handling. From the overview table, you can go to the situation page where context information and related actions help you solve the situation.

In this blog, you will learn how to use the extended framework for Situation Handling based on demo cases. Business Scenario for the Demo Case of a Fictional Flight Booking Scenario. As in any business, trust, reliability, and a smooth process is to be looked upon. The sales and profit of the flights are considered. Other issues like Cancellation, Overbooking, rebooking, missing, or flight delays must be captured thoroughly. To get a better grip on the processes the right user groups should get informed if such issues are likely to happen. These heads-ups allow us to react to the situations in time and decrease negative effects to a minimum.

The Situation Handling app supports these cases. You can manipulate the flight data, for instance by assigning a smaller plane to overbook the economy class.

Figure 2: Flight details showcased by Situation Handling Application

The end user gets a notification on the SAP Fiori launchpad.

Figure 3: Notification Preview

The situation is also displayed in the list view of the My situation-extended app. The details about the situations are shown on the situation page in the My situation-extended app. Situation Configuration with Templates, Scenarios, and Objects. The extended framework for Situation Handling introduces the new concepts situation scenario and situation object in addition to the existing situation template. This three-layer approach lets you configure your own situations in a generic yet controlled way. As you know from the standard framework of Situation Handling, situation templates are used as blueprints for use cases. The pain points identified in the fictional booking portal translate well into templates which are configured in the Manage Situation -Extended app. For the overbooking case, the values of seat occupancy and flight date are of interest. Situations can be detected by a regular check of the flight data or by events such as new bookings, cancelled bookings, or upgrades. Taking the details of the templates into account, we can see a similar pattern. All templates refer to a flight. The flight data can be observed with a batch job. Alternatively, situations can be triggered by a flight event or a booking event. This means you can combine these use cases within a scenario. The situation scenario provides the basis for situation templates of a similar pattern. It defines the anchor object that is affected by a situation, which, in our case, is the flight. The scenario also contains all the triggers that relate to the flight, for instance, the batch job to check flight data and events that change flight data or booking data. This rather generic collection of situation triggers for an anchor object lets you create a wide range of templates. Any trigger can be used to model conditions based on any supported data from the CDS views. Scenarios are configured in the Manage Situation Scenario app.

The demo scenario is based on two objects: the flight and the booking. These objects are not specific to our demo scenario, they could also be used for further scenarios, for instance, to configure situations for bookings, or in combination with further objects for modelling flight maintenance and service cases. The scenario supports reusability by mapping the objects while the details of the objects are configured in the Manage Situation Object app. A situation object is a model of a business object that reuses application artefacts. The main components for the detection of situations are CDS views, which represent the object and events that trigger situations. In addition to modelling the detection of situations with the extended framework, you also configure how the end user is informed – either through SAP Fiori launchpad notifications and/or the Manage Situation Extended application. Sending notifications to the right group of users works as it does for the standard framework for Situation Handling. You define the texts in the situation templates. With the extended framework, you can now configure different texts for each condition too. The Manage Situation Extended app provides many more features for the end user, including search and filter functions and a situation page with detailed information and solution proposals.

Figure 4: The situation of Flight along with Proposed Solution

In addition to modelling triggers for an object, you can also add actions that help users solve a situation. In the scenario, you select the actions that support the business case as defined in the situation object. You can configure the scenario-specific layout of the My Situation- Extended app. For the scenario-specific list view, you can choose to add one column with detailed data related to the anchor object (flight) and another for the trigger object (flight or booking). You can also configure filter options for the selected data. For the situation page, you can configure a detail section for the anchor object and the trigger object. In the situation template, the texts for the situation instance and notifications are defined as in the standard framework. Here by, you filter which actions are relevant for a specific use case.

Figure 5: The Details of the Flight Situations Scenario

In conclusion we learn the complete scenario of what a situation is in any realm of business. The causes of that situation, the trigger points, the action items required to be done after the situation takes place. And along with that we learn our options to resolve or propose a solution to handle the situation.

Use custom action in Intelligent Situation Automation to resolve situation type Quantity Deficit in Supplier Delivery

2023-06-27T05:15:30+02:00

In the blog How to Configure Intelligent Situation Automation for Physical Inventory Monitoring in 5 Easy Steps, ranjitha.balaramanhas explained how to use predlivered action to resolve situation. Then if there is no predelivered action for some situation types, how do the customers resolve the situation types ? The answer is using custom action. Then the next question is how to realize a custom action. Customers can use custom code deployed in BTP cloud foundry or kyma, SPA,Integration suite,etc to realize custom action.

Today I will explain how to deploy an application in BTP cloud foundry as custom action in Intelligent Situation Automation to resolve situation type Quantity Deficit in Supplier Delivery . The function is when the situation instance triggered, the custom applicaiton will get the supplier's email address from master data by using cloud sdk and prepare an email with context information from situation instance. Then the supplier will be automatically notified.

The following is the main code in server.js .

const xsenv = require('@sap/xsenv')

const bodyParser = require('body-parser');

const serviceBindings = xsenv.getServices({

    deficitactionuaa: {tag: 'xsuaa'}

})

const UAA_CREDENTIALS = serviceBindings.deficitactionuaa



const express = require('express')

const app = express();

const xssec = require('@sap/xssec')

const passport = require('passport')

const mail = require('nodemailer')

const {retrieveJwt} = require('@sap-cloud-sdk/core')

const {businessPartnerService} = require('@sap/cloud-sdk-vdm-business-partner-service')

const JWTStrategy = xssec.JWTStrategy

passport.use('JWT', new JWTStrategy(UAA_CREDENTIALS))

app.use(passport.initialize())

app.use(express.text())

app.use(bodyParser.json());



function getSupEmail(situBody,jwtB){

    const supId = situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.SUPPLIER;

    console.log(supId);

    const { businessPartnerApi,businessPartnerAddressApi,addressEmailAddressApi} = businessPartnerService();

   return businessPartnerApi.requestBuilder()

    .getByKey(supId).select(businessPartnerApi.schema.BUSINESS_PARTNER,businessPartnerApi.schema.TO_BUSINESS_PARTNER_ADDRESS

        .select(businessPartnerAddressApi.schema.ADDRESS_ID,businessPartnerAddressApi.schema.TO_EMAIL_ADDRESS.select(addressEmailAddressApi.schema.EMAIL_ADDRESS))).execute({

        destinationName: 'situo5p',

        jwt: jwtB

    })



}









app.listen(process.env.PORT,  () => { console.log('===> Server started') })





app.post('/action', passport.authenticate('JWT', {session: false}), (req, res) => {

    const auth = req.authInfo



    if (! auth.checkScope(UAA_CREDENTIALS.xsappname + '.scopefordeficitaction')) {

        console.log(`===> [/action] ERROR scope for webhook access ('scopefordeficitaction') is missing`)

        res.status(403).end('Forbidden. Authorization for webhook access is missing.')

    }else{

        //  console.log(req.body);

         console.log(req.body.input.dataContext);



         const situBody = JSON.parse(req.body.input.dataContext);



         const jwtB = retrieveJwt(req);



        getSupEmail(situBody,jwtB).then(email=>{

            // console.log(email.toBusinessPartnerAddress[0].toEmailAddress[0].emailAddress);

            const transport = mail.createTransport({

                service: 'Outlook365',

                auth:{

                    user: 'firstname.lastname@outlook.com',

                    pass: 'password'

                }

                });

                const content =  "There are deficit in purchase order item" + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASINGDOCUMENT + "-"

                + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASINGDOCUMENTITEM + ",We Ordered " + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.MATERIALNAME + "quantity"

                 + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.ORDEREDQUANTITY + " " + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASEORDERQUANTITYUNIT + ",but you only confirmed  "

                 +  situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.CONFIRMEDQUANTITY + ", Would you please check again? ";

                const subject = "deficit in Purchase Order " + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASINGDOCUMENT + "Item " + situBody.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASINGDOCUMENTITEM;





            const mailoptions = {

                from: "firstname.lastname@outlook.com",

                to:  email.toBusinessPartnerAddress[0].toEmailAddress[0].emailAddress ,

                subject: subject,

                text:  content

                };



        transport.sendMail(mailoptions,function(err,info){

            if (err) {

                res.status(501).send(err);

            } else {

                res.status(201).send(info);

            }

        }) ;





        })

        .catch(err=>{

            console.log('err:'+err);

            res.status(501).send(err);

        })

    }

})

The following is application in cloud foundry after deployment .

create a destination for the deployed application:

Use the destination in situation type configuration in Intelligent Situation Automation:

I just put the main steps and screen shot of the settings above, if you want to implement this, you can following the mission Automate Resolutions for PO Quantity Deficit from S/4HANA Cloud which will give you step by step guidance.

If you also want to implement automate resolving situation type Physical Inventory Monitoring with step by step guidance, you can follow the mission Automate Resolutions For Physical Inventory From SAP S/4HANA Cloud .

We also record a webinar for these 2 scenarios with Recording. We put everything in onepage including PPT for your reference .

The end!

Thank you for your time!

Best regards!

Jacky Liu

How Developer Extensibility lets you create your own Situation Handling Use Case (1/3)

2023-07-21T13:47:32+02:00

Picture this, you’re trying to create your own Situation Handling use case. There’s an urgent business issue that Situation Handling can detect and bring to the attention of the end users. Your idea is to calculate a ratio based on summing up some line items that should trigger the situation. You start to create your own view using the Custom CDS Views app and suddenly you realize that defining “group by” and aggregations aren’t available as stated in this blog post. This doesn’t have to be a showstopper for you. Let me show you why (not).

My name is Joerg Rett and I am the lead for Data, Analytics and Developer Extensibility in the Situation Handling team. In this blog post series you will follow as I show you the steps for creating your own Situation Handling use case as introduced in Angelika Salmen’s blog post. The blog post series is organized in the following way:

This first blog post introduces the use case, the 3-system landscape and the part of developer extensibility.

The second blog post follows up with the first part of key-user extensibility from the perspective of an extensibility specialist.

The third and final blog post deals with the second part of key-user extensibility from the perspective of a business process configuration expert. It shows how the business user experiences situation instances and monitoring of activities.

While overcoming the challenge described, you will experience the power and freedom you get when you combine developer extensibility with key user extensibility.

With the SAP S/4HANA Cloud ABAP Environment, also known as Embedded Steampunk, it is possible to develop ABAP Cloud extensions on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition as introduced in Boris Gebhardt’s blog post. This means you can use public SAP APIs released by SAP to access SAP data as well as ADT (ABAP Development Tools) as your ABAP IDE.

In another blog post, this one written by Georg Wilhelm, you can see how the combination of developer extensibility and key user extensibility lets you create custom fields with ABAP implemented Value Help.

Let’s start by understanding the use case.

Cost center budget threshold exceeded

In this case, our business user is Sarah, an overhead accountant. In the Cost Center Budget Report app, she can monitor the budget spent. Each GL Account Group receives a certain budget per quarter, for example, € 100.000 for travel. If most of the budget has been spent and the end of the quarter is still a ways off, Sarah may need to take a closer look. Maybe someone needs to postpone their business trip or travel expenses need to be restricted. In any case, Sarah would know what to do. In our example she can see that most of the budget for an accounting group has been spent in fiscal period two.

Sarah starts thinking that her life would be so much easier if she were notified about budgets requiring her attention.

But hey, isn’t that why the Situation Handling framework was built? You just need to create a CDS view that calculates a ratio based on summing up the line items reflecting the money that has been spent. The easiest way to do that is to aggregate based on the “group by” function you’re familiar with. The problem is that “group by” isn’t available in the Custom CDS Views app. But don’t worry, you can create a custom CDS view using developer extensibility; from there continue with key user extensibility to create situation objects.

So, first, let’s figure out where you need to create the artifacts and which role you need.

What’s created where and by whom?

Let’s start with the question: Where you can implement your objects? The 3-system landscape, as shown on SAP Help Portal, consists of a development system, a test system, and a production system (see below).

The development system is divided in the development tenant (080) and the customizing tenant (100). The path you need to follow looks like this:

Start as a developer in the development tenant.

While following this path, you will create the artifacts below.

Start to create a custom CDS view in the development tenant.

Reference this custom CDS view in a situation object in the customizing tenant.

Create a situation scenario that uses this situation object.

Create a situation template based on the situation scenario.

Create a situation type from the situation template.

Note: The last four steps all take place in the customizing tenant.

This is the way. The first artifact you need to develop is the custom CDS view that does the aggregating.

Get started with developer extensibility

As mentioned, before you aggregate using “group by”, which is not available in the Custom CDS Views app and take advantage of the vast possibilities offered by developer extensibility. As described in Boris Gebhardt’s blog post, in your case it would make sense to base your custom CDS view on an SAP CDS view released by SAP with a C1 contract for use in for ABAP Cloud development.

Using as ADT (ABAP Development Tools) as your ABAP IDE you can see that the interface view I_COSTCENTERBUDGET is released for use in cloud development.

With this pre-condition fulfilled, you can now create your custom CDS view, for example, ZI_COSTCENTERBUDGET

@EndUserText.label: 'Cost Center Budget with consumption'

define view entity ZI_CostCenterBudget

With a select on the interface view

as select from I_CostCenterBudget (

you can access the important fields, such as cost center. You need to decide which fields from the interface view you also want to have available in your custom CDS view. This requires some imagination about what you might need later on, on the way from the custom CDS view to the situation type. You also need to think about how you want business users to experience situation instances through notifications and My Situations – Extended app. These are the fields that play a role in this specific use case:

Anchor Object Key:
A situation needs to by “anchored” to a unique entry in your custom CDS view, so the anchor object key field needs to be part of your custom CDS view.

Semantic Key Fields:
The anchor object key is often a concatenation of fields that form a unique ID. To give the user the information about which field contributes to which part of the key, you define a sematic key whose fields need to be part of your custom CDS view.

Condition Filter:
You want to create situations only for company code 1010. The business process configuration expert will define this in the condition filter of the Manage Situation Types – Extended You need to include all the fields that will be used as conditions in your custom CDS view.

Text Parameter:
You want to the number of the cost center to be visible in the notification. The business process configuration expert will define this in the texts for the messages in the Manage Situation Types – Extended You need to include all the fields that will be used as variables in your custom CDS view.

Navigation Parameters:
You want that the navigation to the Cost Center Budget Report app already sets the filter for the fiscal year. The extensibility specialist will define this in the navigation parameters of the Manage Situation Objects You need to include all the fields that will be used as parameters in your custom CDS view.

For other use cases you also might want to consider a trigger object key different from the anchor object key, parameters that are needed for the callback action, columns with detailed data in the My Situations – Extended app, and what should be part of the detail section in the situation page.

You’ll see the following custom CDS view fields again along the way.

BudgetCarryingCostCenter,

GLAccount,

@EndUserText.label: 'G/L Account Group'

GLAccountHierNodeSemanticKey,

FiscalYear,

FiscalPeriod,

CompanyCode,

CompanyCodeCurrency,

Now you need to verify whether any of the fields can serve as a unique identifier for the anchor object (see SAP Help Portal for more details).

This identifier needs to come from a field in a table, which means it should be persistent in the database. In cases in which this is not possible, you may use a calculated field in the CDS view and concatenate multiple fields into a new unique identifier. However, you need to be aware of the limitations: using calculated fields will have a negative effect on performance, and cause both the detection of situations and the determination of responsible users to become significantly slower. If the underlying data set is too large, this can cause the processing to fail. Thus, this approach can only be recommended if you expect the data set exposed by your CDS view to be small (max. a few hundred entries).

Once you are sure which combination of fields will define a single record, you can concatenate them. In your case, it is the combination of Cost Center, G/L Account and a period.

@EndUserText.label: 'Cost Center Budget Key'

concat(concat(BudgetCarryingCostCenter, GLAccount), concat(FiscalYear,FiscalPeriod)) as CostCenterBudgetKey,

Next, aggregate the line items for costs and budgets using “sum()” as and “group by”. This type of aggregation is exactly what is possible only with developer extensibility.

@Semantics.amount.currencyCode: 'CompanyCodeCurrency'

@EndUserText.label: 'Assigned Costs Sum'

sum(TotAssgdAmtInCoCodeCurrency) as TotAssgdAmtInCoCodeCurrencySum,

As the last step you simply calculate the budget consumption from the assigned costs and the budget.

@EndUserText.label: 'Budget Consumption'

  case when sum(BudgetAmountInCompanyCodeCrcy) > 0.0

    then 

      cast ( cast( 100 * sum( TotAssgdAmtInCoCodeCurrency ) as

      abap.fltp ) / cast( sum( BudgetAmountInCompanyCodeCrcy )

      as abap.fltp) as abap.dec( 9, 2 ) )

    else cast( 0.0 as abap.dec( 9, 2 ) ) 

  end as BudgetConsumption

Finally, your custom CDS view to be release with a C1 contract so it can be used in the system. It is crucial that the release state confirms the use in key user apps.

The additional confirmation for use in cloud development is not important for this use case but might be useful in cases you in which you want to reuse the view for developer extensibility later on.

What you learned and what will come next

You started as a developer to create a custom CDS view based on a public SAP API with standard source code to aggregate line items and calculate a consumption ration.

Next as an extensibility specialist you will use this CDS view to create a situation object which represents the budget consumption.

How Developer Extensibility lets you create your own Situation Handling Use Case (2/3)

Want to learn more or refresh your knowledge on Situation Handling?

More blog posts about Situation Handling are available:

Custom Situation Cases: Configure your own use cases (1/6)

The Power of Reuse – Custom Situation Configuration

Fine-Tuning Custom Situations: Closing Behavior of Situation Instances

Fine-Tuning of Custom Situations: Configure the Layout of My Situations – Extended

Custom Situation Handling Use Case for Professional Services: Unstaffed Resource Requests

Monitor Your Custom Situations

For more information, see SAP Help Portal for Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Community for Intelligent Situation Handling. We welcome your valuable feedback.

How Developer Extensibility lets you create your own Situation Handling Use Case (2/3)

2023-07-21T13:47:58+02:00

After choosing Create, you are prompted to enter an Object ID, for example, CC_BUDGET_2. On the next page you describe your object.

Next, reference the custom CDS view you created earlier. You do this in the Structures section when you choose Create there. First enter a Structure ID, for example, CDS_COSTCENTERBUDGET. The prefix CDS_ is recommended to indicate clearly that the structure is based on a CDS view. It also helps you in the later configuration steps to identify the structure. You might want to look at the complete guidelines regarding texts for IDs, names, and descriptions of the Situation Handling framework on the Fiori for Web Design Guidelines page.

On the next page you’ll describe your structure. After selecting CDS as the Structure Type, you enter your custom CDS view as Structure Name, such as ZI_COSTCENTERBUDGET and further describe it.

As the Sematic Key, you take the fields that make up the unique identifier of the anchor object and arrange them accordingly. Choose Apply to finish the Structures section.

Next, you specify to where our business user Sarah will be able to navigate to from the My Situations – Extended app. Under Navigation Targets, you assign navigation actions to business apps that help solve a situation. Use this option if no direct action is available to solve a situation or if situations are too complex to be handled with just one click. Enter the semantic object and the semantic object action for the app that you want to display. Choose Create, then enter an ID, for example, NAV_CCBUDGETREPORT which defines the navigation to the Cost Center Budget Report app.

You enter the Semantic Object and Action given by the app.

Once Sarah navigates to the app, you want her to focus on the data which caused the situation. You achieve this by setting the navigation parameters. As mentioned in the section about the custom CDS view, this is one of the design considerations you have think about beforehand. Choose Apply to finish the Navigation Targets section.

This navigation needs to be embedded in an action which you define in the End-User Actions section. There you specify button labels for the actions that are displayed to end users on the situation page in the My Situations – Extended app. Choose Create, then enter an ID, for example, ACT_CCBUDGETANALYSE. On the object page you choose Navigation Action as Action Type, define the name the button has in the My Situations – Extended app and reference the navigation you have just defined.

Choose Apply to finish the End-User Actions section. When you choose Create, your situation object is ready for use.

The next step on your journey is to use the situation object in a situation scenario.

Create a situation scenario using key user extensibility

Still logged-in as an extensibility specialist, you now open the Manage Situation Scenarios app.

After choosing Create, you are asked to provide a scenario ID, for example, CC_BUDGET_CONTROL_2. As scenario type you select object-based and as object structure type you choose CDS.

On the next page, describe your scenario and connect to a Responsibility Context ID, for example, YY1_CC_BUDGET_MANAGEMENT.

Next, reference the situation object you created earlier. This happens in the Anchor Object section by providing an anchor object ID, such as YY1_CC_BUDGET_2 and a structure ID, such as CDS_COSTCENTERBUDGET. You also need to set the Anchor Object Key field as the unique identifier in your custom CDS view, for example, COSTCENTERBUDGETKEY.

As the trigger, you want the Situation Handling framework to check the budget once a day. By choosing Add in the Situation Triggers section, you can define Batch as the Trigger Type and enter a description.

Under Trigger Object Information you will once again reference your previously created object and the unique ID. As Trigger Object Behavior you choose Add/Update.

As the Instance Key, you take the fields that make up the unique identifier of the anchor object and arrange them accordingly.

Under Actions, select the previously created action, for example, Analyze Cost Center Budget. On the object page for this action, you need to choose the parameters for your scenario. You choose all parameters, define them as Dynamic, from Anchor Object and select the respective Field Names. Choose Apply to finish the Action section.

Then, choose Apply to finish the Trigger section.

When you choose Create, your situation scenario is ready for use. Let’s have a look at a brief summary of the situation object’s and situation scenario’s main attributes.

What you learned and what will come next

Continuing as an extensibility specialist you used this CDS view to create a situation object which represents the budget consumption. Then based on this object you built a situation scenario which defined how a situation will be triggered and which actions are provided to the user.

Next as a business process configuration expert you will take this scenario to create a situation template which defines what are the general conditions for creating a situation, which messages should be shown and who should be informed.

How Developer Extensibility lets you create your own Situation Handling Use Case (3/3)

Want to learn more or refresh your knowledge on Situation Handling?

More blog posts about Situation Handling are available:

Custom Situation Cases: Configure your own use cases (1/6)

The Power of Reuse – Custom Situation Configuration

Fine-Tuning Custom Situations: Closing Behavior of Situation Instances

Fine-Tuning of Custom Situations: Configure the Layout of My Situations – Extended

Custom Situation Handling Use Case for Professional Services: Unstaffed Resource Requests

Monitor Your Custom Situations

For more information, see SAP Help Portal for Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Community for Intelligent Situation Handling. We welcome your valuable feedback.

How Developer Extensibility lets you create your own Situation Handling Use Case (3/3)

2023-07-21T13:48:25+02:00

In this blog post series you will follow as I show you the steps for creating your own Situation Handling use case. You will experience the power and freedom you get when you combine developer extensibility with key user extensibility. The first blog post introduced the use case, the 3-system landscape and the part of developer extensibility. The second blog post followed up with the first part of key-user extensibility from the perspective of an extensibility specialist. This third and final blog post deals with the second part of key-user extensibility from the perspective of a business process configuration expert. It shows how the business user experiences situation instances and monitoring of activities.

Next you will use the situation scenario in a situation template.

Create a situation template using key user extensibility

Now continue as Business Process Configuration Expert with the role SAP_BR_BPC_EXPERT. Again, log in to client 100 in the development system. Open the Manage Situation Types - Extended app.

When you choose Create, a combo box appears and you select Create Situation Template. In the popup that follows you enter an ID, such as YY1_CC_BUDGET_THRESHOLD_TEMP_2, and a description. Under Situation Scenario, you reference the previously created scenario and choose Create.

Under Situation Triggers in the subsection Batch-Based Triggers, choose Add and select the previously created trigger, such as the periodical budget check. On the respective page, start by defining the conditions under which a situation is created.

You do this under Conditions by selecting the first item and choosing Edit in the Filters column.

In general, you want to create a situation if the budget consumption is greater than 75%, so you set the condition for the field accordingly and choose OK.

Next come the message texts. In the situation display you select the first item choose Edit. In the text you choose the cost center, g/l account group, and the budget consumption as variables to be shown. You also need to select no aggregation.

The last step in this section is the reference to the previously defined action. Under Navigation Actions, choose Add and select the previously created action, that is, Analyze Cost Center Budget. Choose Apply to finish the Trigger section.

Next, schedule start of the batch run, as required.

As the final step, add a team in the Recipients section.

When you choose Create, your situation template is ready to use.

Finally, you use this situation template to create a specialized situation type.

Create a situation type using key user extensibility

You remain as you are in the Manage Situation Types – Extended app.

When you choose Create, a dialog box appears and you are prompted to select Create Situation Type, enter an ID, such a YY1_CC_BUDGET_THRESHOLD_1010_2, and a description. Under situation scenario, you reference the previously created scenario, YY1_CC_BUDGET_CONTROL_2 and template, YY1_CC_BUDGET_THRESHOLD_TEMP_2. Choose Create.

Your situation type will be a specialized version of the situation template because it includes only a certain company code. This happens in the Situation Trigger / Batch-Based Trigger section by navigating to the Trigger page for the periodical budget check. You simply edit your existing condition by adding a value for the company code.

You can leave the rest as defined by the template. When you choose Create button, your situation type is ready to use. Let’s have a look at the conditions for situation template and situation type.

Now you’re probably eager to see how situations show up for a business user.

Experiencing your situation type as a business user

After the batch run of the situation type has taken place, one or more situation instances are created. You can check this on the manage instances page of your situation type.

Now switch to Sarah logging in as an overhead accountant. You immediately see the red bubble on the ring symbol and by clicking on it the notification on the situation pops up.

Clicking on the notification takes you to the My Situations – Extended app. If an error message comes up, the overhead accountant might not have the role SAP_BR_EMPLOYEE. The administrator can easily fix this. The My Situations – Extended app shows the messages you have defined, and you can check whether the parameter values are correct.

Next, choose Assign to Me, assuming that Sarah wants to deal with the situation. The status changes to In Progress and the processor is shown.

Now choose Analyze Cost Center Budget, which takes you to the Cost Center Budget Report app. You can check to ensure that the filter parameters contain the right values, focusing on the budget component that needs attention.

From there, go back to the My Situations – Extended app and assume that Sarah has solved the situation. Choose Close Situation and select Resolved as the reason for closing.

Monitoring your situation type as a key user

For the last test, log in as a business process configuration expert again. This time open the Monitor Situations - Extended app. In the filter field for situation type ID, enter the ID of the previously created type, YY1_CC_BUDGET_THRESHOLD_1010_2 and choose Go.

The chart shows three activities, and the table shows a grouped entry for the respective type.

You extend the row by clicking on the chevron symbol.

You can verify that activities create, assign, and close a situation instance have been tracked.

Now that you’ve gone from creating a custom CDS view as a developer to analyzing situation data as a key user it’s time for …

A short summary of creating a Situation Handling use-case in a 3-system landscape

The key take-away for you is that the developer extensibility available in 3-system landscapes (3SL) increases your options for creating new Situation Handling use-cases. Key user extensibility alone already provides a huge amount of freedom within the extended framework of Situation Handling. Combined with developer extensibility the possibilities are nearly endless, only limited by the number of public SAP APIs released by SAP with a C1 contract for use in for ABAP Cloud development.

You started the journey as a developer to create a custom CDS view based on a public SAP API with standard source code to aggregate line items and calculate a consumption ratio. As an extensibility specialist you used this CDS view to create a situation object which represents the budget consumption. Then, based on this object you built a situation scenario which defined how a situation is triggered and which actions are provided to the user. As a business process configuration expert, you took this scenario to create a situation template that defines the general conditions for creating a situation, which messages should be shown, and who should be informed. Finally, from this template you set up and enabled a specialized situation type to which you added further conditions.

Finally, you saw how the life of our overhead accountant Sarah has improved by being informed about cost center budgets that need her attention. Again, as a business process configuration expert you got a glimpse of how the Monitor Situations – Extended app could help you to analyze the behavior of the Situation Handling framework and the business process as such.

What you have seen is likewise possible with the public and the private flavor of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Want to learn more or refresh your knowledge on Situation Handling?

More blog posts about Situation Handling are available:

Custom Situation Cases: Configure your own use cases (1/6)

The Power of Reuse – Custom Situation Configuration

Fine-Tuning Custom Situations: Closing Behavior of Situation Instances

Fine-Tuning of Custom Situations: Configure the Layout of My Situations – Extended

Custom Situation Handling Use Case for Professional Services: Unstaffed Resource Requests

Monitor Your Custom Situations

For more information, see SAP Help Portal for Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Community for Intelligent Situation Handling. We welcome your valuable feedback

FSCM - Release Blocked Sales Orders using Manage Credit Management Rules

2023-07-26T16:32:22+02:00

In this blog post, we will cover the steps to setup the system for managing blocked sales orders using the Manage Credit Management Rules and triggering notifications using Situation Handling: Approve Documented Credit Decisions. The information presented here, and screenshots are from SAP S/4HANA 2022 Best Practices CAL instance.

Sales orders that have a negative outcome during credit check results into a blocked sales order. Consequently, a Documented Credit Decision (DCD) is created in the system. For more information on DCD, please refer to the Help SAP portal.

RELEASE VIA DOCUMENTED CREDIT DECISION

The following steps are the minimum setup required to release a blocked sales order using DCD and notify the approver via Situation Handling. It only serves as a guide and you need to tailor fit the rules according to the business requirements.

Manage Teams and Responsibilities (F2412)

In this app, we will define the authorised users to release the blocked sales orders. Go to Manage Teams and Responsibilities Fiori apps and choose Create. Enter the required general information and ensure that you have selected the Type Documented Credit Decision (UKM_DCD). Then maintain the credit segment, team owners, and team members. Save and make sure that you have enabled it.

Documented Credit Decision Approvers

Manage Credit Management Rules (UKM_BRF_CONFIG)

The approval hierarchy that you define allows you to ensure that only authorised persons can release blocked sales orders. Choose the rule for Documented Credit Decision Hierarchy and maintain your approval steps in the table contents.

Approval Hierarchy

Hot Tip: Use the simulation function (Start Simulation) in this app to test your approval steps.

Manage Situation Types (F2947)

Copy the Situation Template FIN_DCD_APPROVAL to create your own Approve Documented Credit Decisions situation type. Enable the Monitor Instances to view and edit the list of the active situation instances for the situation type.

Situation Type FIN_DCD_APPROVAL

Notifications are triggered when an approval hierarchy for the DCD is defined, and a blocked sales order is required to be released or rejected by the users maintained in the hierarchy. In-app notifications within S/4HANA and e-mails can be configured. For multiple levels of approval, the next approver will receive the notification once the prior approver has approved the DCD.

Create Sales Order

Create a sales order that will result into a blocked status by exceeding the business partner's credit limit. A prerequisite to this step is to have a business partner with credit management role (UKM000), corresponding credit limit, and check rule.

Blocked Sales Order

Release Blocked Sales Order

A notification will be triggered to the recipients about the blocked sales order pending their approval.

Notification

Clicking on the notification will direct the approver to the DCD where it can be approved or rejected.

Credit Blocked Document

Click on Release and confirm that you want to release the DCD. A comment can be entered when releasing the DCD.

Release Blocked Document

API - Sales Document with Credit Block - Read, Check, Release, Reject (A2X)

In case you are interested on exploring further steps on managing blocked sales order through SAP Build, the API Sales Document with Credit Block - Read, Check, Release, Reject (A2X) is available. The corresponding API, Schema, and Documentation are available in the SAP Business Accelerator Hub.

I hope this blog post helped you understand the usage of Management Credit Management Rules and Situation Handling for managing blocked sales orders.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition 2308 Intelligent ERP Update

2023-07-27T16:14:32+02:00

Welcome to the second blog post of the intelligent ERP blog post series for 2023. We will again share insights on the latest artificial intelligence technologies that will foster your journey to the intelligent enterprise.

Artificial intelligence and automation are two of the biggest technology trends that will massively transform businesses. Artificial intelligence will enable machines to learn and make decisions like humans, while automation will streamline processes and reduce human error.

July 26, 2023 marked the general availability of our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2308 release. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition we offer a fully-fledged solution that leads to optimized processes for a successful business. How does it do that? The “intelligent” ERP combines the most modern technologies to automate business processes and predict business events to help your business to run smoothly with a unique suite of best of breed–our philosophy from day 1.

Take a look at my video below to get a first glimpse into what the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2308 release offers for the intelligent enterprise:

Collaboration

In the last release, I introduced you to our SAP Collaboration Manager. This innovative, cloud-based collaboration feature replaced the human-to-human chat function of the former SAP CoPilot in the three-system landscape. It is seamlessly integrated in the SAP Fiori Launchpad and offers you and your co-workers the possibility to instantly collaborate, without any system switchover. Here’s how it works:

An internal sales rep follows up on a ToDo and takes a screenshot of a purchase order that needs approval.

Using SAP Collaboration Manager, they create a chat and invite their co-workers to collaborate. In this release, we have made enhancements to offer an even more user-friendly collaboration experience. Now you will be able to:

Link your chat to any screen in your apps for reference,

Take screenshots without the need to close SAP Collaboration Manager, annotate, and highlight them,

Receive chat notifications on the SAP Fiori launchpad as soon as your co-workers invite you,

Figure 1: We’ve packed the SAP Collaboration Manager with new features that offer a great user experience.

See what more is planned with the SAP Collaboration Manager here.

SAP Build Process Automation

We continuously work on automating your business processes wherever possible. With SAP Build Process Automation, we’re getting a step closer to this with each release. Since the last release we’ve added even more process automation bot templates that help you to get started quickly on the most on-demand use cases. These pre-delivered bot templates are fully compatible with SAP Build Process Automation 2.0, our newer bot environment where we can build bots directly in the SaaS application with the Cloud Studio following SAP’s low-code no-code approach. They can be further extended with workflow elements such as business rules or approval forms in order to flexibly automate larger, more complex business processes and involve more stakeholders beyond individual use cases. Check out our SAP Build Content Catalog to find out how these bots can help you to meet your automation goal.

Figure 2: The SAP Build Content Catalog offers a variety of bot templates that help you to automate your business process.

I would like to mention two interesting bots here:

Aging Analysis of Supplier Invoices with Pay-When-Paid Terms: This bot generates an aging report of supplier invoices with pay-when-paid terms that are outstanding but still blocked for payment. The bot first identifies supplier invoices in your SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition system that meet criteria specified in an input template file. The bot then calculates the age in days of the matching supplier invoices. After execution, it generates an aging report in the Excel format that lists all the matching records, together with their supplier, customer, project, and billing information and sends an email together with this report to the specified stakeholders. The aging report generated by the bot facilitates exception management as it enables the accounts payable accountant to easily identify and prioritize past due supplier invoices that need to be paid, even if customer payment has not been received yet.

Mass Creation of Purchase Orders: This bot creates purchase orders in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition system based on an Excel input file from the user. All you need to do is provide the purchase order details in the Excel template file. The bot reads the details in the Excel input file and creates the purchase orders in the system. It then saves the output files in the base folder.

Situation Handling Technology

We continuously optimize business processes with Situation Handling technology, informing the right users about business events that need their immediate attention to help you avoid any conflicts altogether! In this release, we offer two main scenarios:

In Finance, the use case ‘Change of Credit Limit’ informs the credit analysts automatically when the credit limit of a business partner has changed. The change can happen through manual adjustments as well as due to automatic calculations. Credit analysts benefit from this notification, because they stay informed without having to proactively look up the information for business partners.

Figure 3: Situation handling, change of credit limit.

In the Sourcing and Procurement area, we have the use case ‘Supplier Quotation Submitted’. With this use case, the rights users will be alerted when a new supplier quotation is submitted for sourcing project. This helps reduce processing time and potential for mistakes.

Figure 4: Situation handling for Supplier Quotation.

Machine Learning

Intelligent Scenario Lifecycle Management (ISLM) is a framework that allows you to perform lifecycle management operations on machine learning scenarios. In this release, ISLM now supports Data Push Management for SAP Business Technology Platform based service Data Attribute Recommendation, for existing intelligent scenarios.

With Data Push Management, ISLM fetches data from the data sources in the system and pushes it to the remote ML provider. This makes it easy to do training with integrated data management handled via ISLM.

Figure 5: ISLM training scenario.

Et voila – now you’ve seen the amazing innovations the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2308 release delivers for the intelligent, sustainable enterprise.

Where can you go next and learn more about this release update and beyond?

Watch the Replays of Our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition 2308 Early Release Series!

This July, we hosted a series of compelling live sessions from the heart of the SAP S/4HANA Engineering organization. Missed the live sessions? Watch our replays on demand!

Here, you can find a 53-minute recording and a presentation for intelligent technology topics as well as 19 other topics as part of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 2308 release. For more information on the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Early Release Series and how to sign up for it, check out this blog post.

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast

As always, I would like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast “Inside SAP S/4HANA”. This podcast leverages the unique knowledge and expertise of SAP S/4HANA product experts, partners and customers to address objects of interest by sharing product insights and project best practice. There is no customer success without product success and project success; we share all ingredients with you to get to the next level and make your SAP S/4HANA project a success. Subscribe now and benefit from the shared knowledge!

openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA

Our openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA offer an exciting new learning opportunity. What began with a small batch of 20 videos, has now become a channel with more than 50 microlearnings that have generated over 20,000 views since then. Today we cover multiple lines of business such as finance, manufacturing, and supply chain, and key technology topics like Master Data Management, key user extensibility, SAP User Experience, and upgrade management. We are continuously adding new microlearnings to the SAP S/4HANA channel, so make sure you check them out.

Your Voice Matters!

If you want to learn more and actively engage with SAP subject matter experts on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition, join our SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition community–now fully integrated with SAP Community. The community brings together customers, partners, and SAP experts and has a clear mission: deliver an interactive community to engage with one another about best practices and product solutions. We invite you to explore the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition community ‘one-stop shop’ as the central place for all resources, tools, content questions, answers and connect with experts to guide you through your journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition.

Other SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Enablement Assets

SAP S/4HANA is the foundation of the intelligent enterprise and is an innovative, robust, and scalable ERP. We at Cloud ERP Product Success and Cloud Co-Innovation offer a service as versatile as our product itself. Check out the numerous offerings our Enablement team has created for you below:

Further Information:

Highlights of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition release here

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition release info here

Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition release blog posts here and previous release highlights here

Product videos for SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA

SAP S/4HANA PSCC Digital Enablement Wheel here

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Public Edition Early Release Series here

Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here

openSAP microlearnings for SAP S/4HANA here

Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition here

SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition community: here

Feature Scope Description here

What’s New here

Help Portal Product Page here

Feel free to ask your questions on SAP Community here. Follow the SAP S/4HANA Cloud tag and the PSCC_Enablement tag to stay up to date with the latest blog posts.

Follow us on @SAP and #S4HANA, and myself on yannick.peterschmitt.

Situation Handling for SD Billing Document Not Posted to Accounting

2023-08-03T02:32:54+02:00

Are you already benefiting from the ready-to-use functionalities for Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA Cloud to streamline your Order to Cash billing process? Billing documents that are not posted to accounting often remain unnoticed or unresolved, causing roadblocks such as:

Inaccurate revenue data sales and financial reporting

Increased days sales outstanding

Delayed customer invoicing and revenue recognition, causing negative impact on cash flow.

Situation Handling for SD Billing Documents Not Posted to Accounting can minimize these inefficiencies in your billing process by streamlining and reducing the time to resolution. Let’s look at the key benefits:

Figure 1: Manage Situation Types app with Pre-delivered Situation Templates that can be copied to create your own customizable Situation Type.

1. Automatic check for billing documents not posted to accounting

Typically, billing clerks may run a billing document report periodically to check the posting statuses and identify those not posted to accounting. The reality is that this task is often postponed to the month-end and the issues don’t get any attention until the last minute. Situation Handling for SD Billing Documents Not Posted to Accounting, automatically checks for documents requiring attention based on predefined conditions and at a predefined interval.

Figure 2: Inform of situation instances that match the predefined Conditions. In this case, the filter is applied for several Sold To Parties in the Manage Situation Types app.

Figure 3: Set a batch job start time in the Batch Job Scheduling section of the Manage Situation Types app

2. Streamline error resolution by routing directly to the correct recipient

Billing documents aren’t posted to accounting for a variety of reasons, such as account determination issues, missing pricing, and issues with master data settings. The billing clerk who runs the error report may not be the same clerk who’s responsible for resolving the error and can spend unnecessary time routing the error to different teams in the organization to reach the correct contact. With Situation Handling, the notification can be sent directly to predefined teams or recipients based on the type of issue, thereby reducing external communication efforts and ultimately reducing time to resolution. Useful criteria such as Sales Organization, Sold to Party, Bill-to Payer, Net Value, Billing Type, and so on, which can serve as further filters to route the situation instance (in this case billing document errors) to the appropriate recipient for resolution.

Figure 4: Filter by Issue Type and other criteria in the Conditions section of the Manage Situation Types app

Figure 5: Issue Type and Issue Type Descriptions

Figure 6: Define situation recipients in the Responsibility by Teams section of the Manage Situation Types app

3. Proactive notifications to drive faster issue resolution

Once the proper recipients are defined, they will receive proactive notifications on SAP Fiori Launchpad for situation instances that apply to them. The recipients can then take timely action to resolve and prevent downstream impacts and further delays to billing, revenue recognition, and cash receipt.

Figure 7: Notifications in the Fiori Launchpad

Recipients can also access the situations using the My Situations app, which displays the open situations. The My Situations app is updated automatically after the daily batch job runs or as the recipients manually marks each instance as complete after resolution.

Figure 8: My Situations app displaying open situations

Watch this video by the Q2C CTU Billing Team with further details about the Situation Handling use case.

In summary, Situation Handling for SD Billing Documents Not Posted to Accounting can provide significant value in the SD Billing Process. It does so by eliminating the manual and repetitive task of checking the posting status of billing documents. This reduces the time errors needed to reach the correct recipient for resolution and allows the said recipient to easily access the outstanding billing documents and see the issues that require their attention. Ultimately, this leads to faster issue resolution, improved operational efficiency in billing, and improved cash flow and financial performance of your business.

How to Start with Custom Situations: High-Level Design of the Use Case (1/4)

2023-09-12T16:57:42+02:00

My name is Angelika Salmen and I am the product owner of Situation Handling. With this blog post series, I want to help you to start creating your own situation cases. The first blog post supports you in drafting your use case.

My guidance relates to the extended framework for Situation Handling which has been available since SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2202 and SAP S/4HANA 2021 FPS2.

Can Situation Handling help my case?

Situation Handling detects business situations and automatically informs the right users about issues requiring their attention. Contextual information and solution proposals support the users in solving a situation.
Situation Handling is loosely coupled with application artefacts which come with the following benefits, constraints, and recommendations.

Benefits

No change is required for business applications
No change is required for business processes
Situation Handling can be added at anytime

Constraints

Observing application data and events is based on separate processes
The loose coupling might lead to some delays in detecting situations, depending on the system load

Recommendations

Situation Handling is designed to support humans
Situation Handling isn't built for high volume processing, such as IoT
Use Situation Handling as a supportive tool
Don't use Situation Handling as the primary tool for time-critical, life-critical, or security-relevant use cases

Prerequisites

SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP S/4HANA2021 FPS2 or newer
Scope item for Situation Handling (31N)
Scope item for Responsibility Management (1NJ)
SAP Fiori Launchpad
Relevant business roles

Business case

Let’s start thinking about the business case. What are the value and risks, and who needs to be informed about a situation?

Scenario

Describe the business case with its benefits and risks.

Value
Impact

User story

Also think about the value from the user’s perspective.

As <user> I want to <goal> so that <reason>

Persona

Provide a short description of the persona that will be informed about the situation.

Roles
Tasks
Goals

High-level situation design

As a next step, think about how a user should be informed about a situation.

User support

Start thinking from the user‘s perspective:

What is the business situation the user needs to be informed about?
Which information would help the user solve a situation?
Which quick actions could solve a situation immediately?
Which related apps enable the user to solve the cause of a situation or provide further information and support for solving the situation?

Example: Expiring Contract

Situation text: Contract <contract_number> expires on <date>. Please, extend or replace the contract.
Supporting information: contract volume, contract type, supplier, target volume, target quantity, currency
Quick actions: none
Related app: Manage Contracts

The screen shots below illustrate how the user perceives a situation.

Scenario-specific list view in My Situations - Extended app

Situation Page in My Situations - Extended app

Situation conditions

Now, let’s take a closer look at the conditions that trigger a situation.
Which object is affected by the situation (anchor object)?
Which object triggers the situation?

The anchor object
Another object
Multiple objects: anchor object, one or more trigger objects

What is the situation trigger?

An event performed on a business object (for example, created, approved, or deleted)
A periodical check of data by a batch job
- How often should the batch job be executed: monthly, weekly, or daily?

Which data triggers a situation?

One or more data fields that are relevant for the condition

Under which circumstances is the situation triggered? Define the values of the data, for instance:

The data matches a value, for example, company code = 1010
The data has a certain ratio, for example, > 80 %
The data has a time relation, for example, within the next 14 days

Solution proposals

Is there a quick action that can resolve the situation, for example, the action Assign Contract which assigns a new contract to an open purchase requisition.

One or more quick actions (optional)

Related apps

Related business apps can help users solve the situation by finding more detailed information or solving the root cause.

One or more related apps (optional)

Situation recipients

Who are the users you want to inform about situations?

One or more specific teams
People with specific responsibilities across teams
Dynamically identify the recipient such as the creator of a requisition

Now you have the draft design of your situation case.

Let’s move on and detail the use case.

How to Start with Custom Situations: High-Level Design of the Use Case (1/4)
How to Start with Custom Situations: Detailed Design of Your Use Case (2/4)
How to Start with Custom Situations: Design Your Situation Object (3/4)
How to Start with Custom Situations: Define Your Scenario (4/4)

You can also refer to:

SAP Help Portal: Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Responsibility Management

SAP Community: Intelligent Situation Handling

How to Start with Custom Situations: Detailed Design of Your Use Case (2/4)

2023-10-04T12:23:42+02:00

My name is Angelika Salmen, and I am the product owner of Situation Handling. With this blog post series, I want to give you guidance about how to start creating your own situation use cases. After you’ve drafted your use case, let’s take a look at the detailed situation design.

Detailed situation design

Once again, put yourself into the shoes of the user and think about how they should be informed about the situation.

User information

Per default, every situation is visible in the My Situations – Extended app on SAP Fiori launchpad. The tile also shows whether any situations exist and, if so, how many.

Note: For SAP S/4HANA you need to activate the OData services for the Situation Handling apps.

Notification

For situations that are very urgent or important, you can also enable notifications that appear on SAP Fiori launchpad. You have various options for configuring notifications.

If you expect only a few situations or if you need precise information, I recommend single notifications:

Send a notification for each situation.

If you expect many situations and / or if you use batch-based situation triggers, I recommend using one of the aggregation functions that avoid potential overload for the user. Aggregated notifications contain multiple situations detected at one point in time:

Aggregate all situations in one notification, for example: There are <amount> pending supplier confirmations.”

Aggregate notifications for a specific situation value, for example, aggregate situations per supplier: There are <amount> pending confirmations from <supplier>.”

In addition to sending notifications when a situation is created, you can also notify the user about updates or when a situation has been closed. There are three standard notification behaviors:

Notify everyone when a situation is created, but only notify processors about updates.

Notify no one after a situation has been closed.

Notify everyone when a situation has been reopened.

The notifications are part of the condition design, and they are closely related to the life cycle of a situation.

Note: For SAP S/4HANA take a look at the prerequisites for setting up notifications.

Situation recipients

The next question is: Who should be informed? You define the right group of users with Responsibility Management. This applies to both the display of situations in the My Situations – Extended app and to notifications.

You can define recipients by teams or by rules.

Recipients by teams are identified with the team category. Each team configured in Responsibility Management with the corresponding category is informed about the situation. You can use filters to narrow down the target group.

Recipients by rules are typically used for the identification of creators, approvers, and so on.

Conditions

Depending on your use case you can define one or more conditions. You need to define at least one condition that creates a situation. Where possible, you should also consider automatically closing situations that are no longer valid from a business perspective.

Mandatory: Condition for creating a situation. You can use filters to narrow down the situation case, which is specifically recommended when you start using Situation Handling.

Optional: Send a notification.

Optional: Send a notification only when urgency increases (escalation case). This requires 2 conditions:

Recommended: Consider changed circumstances that automatically close a situation.

Example 1: The triggering value of a condition changes.

Create a situation if the triggering value is < 20 %.
Close a situation if the triggering value is >= 20 %.

Example 2: Related data of a situation changes, for instance:

Close a low budget situation after the related project has ended.
Close a discount option situation after the discount period has ended.

Situation display and notifications

If you define multiple conditions, you can adapt the situation and notification texts for each condition. You can also adapt the notification behavior for each condition.

Think about the texts with which you want to inform the user, for example:

Creation of a situation (for instance, 30 days before the expiry date):

Escalation of a situation (for instance, 7 days before the expiry date):

Closing a situation:

Cleaning up a situation (for instance, 30 days after the expiration date):

Multiple trigger objects

Different trigger objects may cause situations. If you use multiple trigger objects, you need to define the conditions, the situation display, and the notification behavior for each trigger. Make sure you use the same configuration for alternative triggers to provide a consistent user experience.

For example, let’s look at an overbooking situation for flights which includes the following circumstances:

A booking is added to a fully booked flight. This creates a situation.
A smaller plane is assigned to a flight and an already confirmed booking turns into an overbooking and creates a situation.
A confirmed booking is deleted, and the free seat is assigned to an overbooking which closes the situation.
The last overbooking is deleted which closes the situation.

Triggers 1) and 2) create a situation and should have the same texts and notification behavior that inform about the new situation.

Triggers 3) and 4) close a situation and should also have the same notification text and behavior.

Event-based triggers vs. batch-based triggers

There are two ways to trigger a situation. A situation can be detected after a business transaction was executed (event-based trigger) or with periodical checks (batch-based trigger).

If you want to inform the user right after a situation has been created, you need to configure an event-based trigger that listens to triggers such as created, updated, and deleted.

If periodical checks are sufficient, I recommend using a batch-based trigger. You can define periods from once a month to multiple times per day.

If you want to detect blockers such as pending confirmations or missing approvals, you also need to use batch-based triggers.

If you expect lots of situations, I recommend configuring batch-based triggers and, where possible, combining them with aggregated notifications to avoid information overload for the users.

Note: For SAP S/4HANA consider the prerequisites for setting up batch jobs.

Design of specific situation behavior

Finally, there are some specific options for configuring situations: instance closing behavior and trigger accumulation.

Instance closing behavior

The instance closing behavior defines if and when a situation can be detected again after it has been closed. The closing behavior applies to any closure type: manual closing, closing with a solution proposal (quick action), and automatic closing by the system.

Close & Delete

If you select Close & Delete, a situation is deleted from the system after it has been closed.

Since the situation is no longer known to the system, situations can be detected again. Here are some examples:

During production, the quality status of a material changes to not accepted. After the situation is resolved the instance is deleted. In a next process step that same material shows another issue, and the quality status changes to not accepted. A new situation is triggered.

A budget is about to be exceeded. After allocating additional money the situation is closed. If the budget consumption surpasses the critical threshold again, a new situation is triggered.

You may also consider using Close & Delete if the only option for closing a situation is manual, and if you want to avoid data accumulation until an automatic clean-up is processed.

With Close & Delete the user cannot override the system. If the user closes a situation manually while the system data is unchanged, the situation will be detected again with the next trigger event or batch run. This can result in a ping-pong effect for the user - especially for frequent batch-based triggers.

Close & Keep

If you close a situation using Close & Keep, only its status changes from open / in progress to resolved / obsolete / invalid. This means that further updates of the closed situation are ignored, and the user is no longer informed about them.

I recommend choosing this behavior if you want to empower the user to override the system, for instance:

Your situation cannot be solved by considering only the system data but requires further information. For instance, replacing an expiring contract needs to be negotiated with suppliers. When a new deal is settled, the user can close the situation.

Updating the situation data is delayed because the check takes place only once a week. The user can close the situation after repairing the root cause and will no longer be distracted.

Since the closing behavior applies to all types of closing, further situation updates will also be ignored if the situation was closed by a quick action, or by a closing condition. Let’s take another look at the budget example.

Condition 1 creates a situation if 80 % of the budget is consumed.

Condition 2 closes the situation if the threshold drops below the 80 %.

If the budget consumption raises and surpasses 80 % again, the user will not be informed if you used Close & Keep.

If you want the user to override the system but still want to inform them about highly critical updates you can use the reopen feature. For the budget example you would need a 3rd condition:

Condition 3 reopens the situation if 95% of the budget is consumed.

This also means that the user can no longer override the system if over 95% of the budget is consumed.

Trigger design (single triggers and trigger accumulation)

You have different options with which to design a situation, depending on which anchor and trigger objects are involved. For example, bookings that surpass the maximum seating capacity of a plane create an overbooking situation. Let’s take this example to illustrate the flexible design options. Choose the option that best fits your use case.

Anchor object = trigger object

The simplest case is if anchor and trigger object are the same. The situation is triggered based on the data and the trigger behavior of that object.

You can design the situation for the booking object, where each create event triggers a new situation if the status of the booking is unconfirmed. Let’s say we have 3 unconfirmed bookings (= overbookings) then the user has 3 situations.

For the notification text, the information on the situation page in the My Situations – Extended app, and so on, you can only include data from the booking object.

Alternatively, you can design the situation for the flight since it also has the seating data.

If you model the situation for the flight object, the initial update event triggers a new situation while further update events update the same situation. That means the 3 overbookings would result in 1 situation.

Alternatively, you can create a batch-based trigger. Again, this would result in only 1 situation. Depending on the settings, the user would be notified less often compared to the event-based trigger.

In both cases, you can include only data from the flight object for the notification text, the information on the situation page in the My Situations – Extended app, and so on.

Anchor and trigger objects are different

Now let’s model the overbooking situation with two objects. You can define flight as anchor object and booking as trigger object. That means that the flight object indicates the situation while it is caused by the bookings. The combination of objects is especially valuable if the situation needs data from both trigger object and anchor object.

The initial create event that results in an unconfirmed booking, triggers a situation for the flight object. All further create events result in an update of the same situation.

You can define data from both the flight and the booking object for the notification text, the information on the situation page in the My Situations – Extended app, and so on.

Trigger accumulation

The situation designs discussed above either trigger a situation for each single event, or one situation indicating the number of issues. Trigger accumulation combines both worlds: the user receives 1 situation that contains the details of all single triggers. Trigger accumulation requires an event-based trigger.

Let’s take another look at our overbooking example.

The anchor object is the flight where the situation is indicated, and the trigger object is the booking.

For the notification text, the information on the situation page in the My Situations – Extended app, and so on, you can define detailed data from both the flight and the booking object.

The single triggers are listed on the situation page and the displayed data corresponds to the selected instance. In our example, you would see the passenger information, such as the name and booking ID.

Trigger accumulation can also take multiple trigger objects into account. Different root causes, for instance, can be block a service order:

Blocked by unavailable material.

Blocked by missing service staff.

Different situation triggers can also have the same trigger object but combined with different trigger events. The overbooking example, could have the following triggers:

Booking created: a new booking is unconfirmed because there is no more seating capacity.

Booking unconfirmed: A smaller plane is assigned to a flight which turns confirmed bookings into unconfirmed ones.

Booking confirmed: A confirmed booking was canceled and an overbooking turns into a confirmed one.

Booking deleted: The cancelation of a booking makes a seat available for an unconfirmed booking.

Now you have the detailed design of your situation case. In the next blog post you can see how to map your use case to existing artifacts.

How to Start with Custom Situations: High-Level Design of the Use Case (1/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Detailed Design of Your Use Case (2/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Design Your Situation Object (3/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Define Your Scenario (4/4)

You can also refer to:

SAP Help Portal: Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Responsibility Management

SAP Community: Intelligent Situation Handling

How to Start with Custom Situations: Design Your Situation Object (3/4)

2023-10-09T11:59:44+02:00

My name is Angelika Salmen and I am the product owner of Situation Handling. With this blog post series, I want to give you guidance about how to start creating your own situation use cases. After you’ve designed your detailed use case, let’s map it to the application artifacts.

High-level design of situation objects

The concept of Situation Handling is based on the reuse of existing application artifacts. The situation object models a business object that refers to these artifacts:

Data structures that represent business object data.

Value help services that support the configuration of situation cases and filter values for the key user.

Business events that trigger the Situation Handling engine.

Navigation targets that are based on Intent-Based Navigation (technical reference).

Callback actions that resolve a situation (technical reference).

End-user buttons that display navigation targets and callback actions on the situation page of the My Situations – Extended

The situation object is the technical basis of Situation Handling. You refer to the situation object throughout further configuration steps from situation scenario to situation template and situation type.

Note: For SAP S/4HANA you need to activate the ODATA Services for the Situation Handling apps.

Detailed configuration of situation objects

The following sections provide an overview of artifacts and configuration parameters that you need to implement your situation case.

General information

Provide meaningful names for your situation object. The situation object needs to refer to an allowlisted SAP business object or a custom object.

Object ID *)

Object Name *)

Object Description *)

SAP Object Type

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Value help services

You can define one or more value help services for a situation object that correspond to the relevant fields in the CDS views. The value help is used for configuration steps such as the condition filters for your situation case in the Manage Situation Types – Extended app or for list filters in the My Situations – Extended app.

VH Service ID *)

Service Protocol Version

Service Path Type

Service Path Binding

Service Version

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Value help properties

Specify all properties from the value help service that are relevant for your situation object.

Entity Set / Property

Structures

You can define one or multiple structures for a situation object. All of them need to be of the same type, that is of type CDS view.

CDS views for object-based situations

Situation objects that refer to business objects such as contracts, materials, services, or suppliers, are represented by CDS views. You can select allowlisted SAP CDS views or custom CDS views. Your custom CDS view should have a unique ID, at least as an annotation, so that it can be clearly referenced.

Structure ID *)

Structure Type: CDS

Structure Name

Description *)

SAP Object Type

SAP Object Node Type

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Semantic key

To be able to reference your object on application UIs, provide a semantic key for the object. This can be a single key such as the number of a contract. It can also be a combination of fields, for instance, representing a flight by airline, connection number, date (LH 101 25.04.2023). The fields are displayed according to the configuration order.

The semantic key is displayed, for example, in the instance list of Manage Situation Types – Extended app and in Monitor Situations – Extended app.

Field Name 1

Field Name 2

Value help mappings

Think about the fields in your CDS view that contain values relevant to your situation object, and select the appropriate value help mappings.

Field Name / Service ID for Value Help (Entity Set, Property)

Events

Define all relevant business events (workflow events) that can trigger the detection of situations. For instance, created, updated, and deleted. If you want to use business events delivered by SAP, they need to be allowlisted. (If your use case is based on a periodical check, you’ll configure it in the situation scenario.)

Event ID *)

Description *)

Event Category

Event Object

Event Type

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Navigation targets

If there are any related apps for your situation case, you need to define the navigation targets. At the very least, you need to define the semantic object and the semantic action for Fiori Intent-Based Navigation. You find the information in the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library.

Navigation ID *)

Semantic Object

Semantic Object Action

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Navigation parameters

If you want users to navigate to a specific object page in the business app, you also need to specify the corresponding parameters.

Navigation Parameter Name

Callbacks

If your situation case supports quick actions that can resolve a situation, you need to specify the callback ID and the callback class.

Callback ID *)

Callback Class

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Callback parameters

To identify the right item, you need to add the parameters of the specific instance you want to resolve.

Callback Parameter Name

End user actions

While navigation targets and callback actions are the technical definitions, you need to specify the texts for the corresponding end user buttons that will be displayed on the situation page of the My Situation – Extended app.

Action ID *)

Action Type

Navigation ID / Callback ID

Button Name *)

Button Description *)

*) see: Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Are you missing an artifact?

The exact artifact you need may not available in the system because it’s not allowlisted. If that’s the case you can consider creating own artifacts, for instance, a CDS view. But you can also revisit your template design and adapt it to the available options. For example, you can consider using a batch-based situation instead of an event-based situation.

In the next blog post I will show you different approaches to designing your scenario.

How to Start with Custom Situations: High-Level Design of the Use Case (1/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Detailed Design of the Use Case (2/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Design the Situation Object (3/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Define Your Scenario (4/4)

You can also refer to:

SAP Help Portal: Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Responsibility Management

SAP Community: Intelligent Situation Handling

How to Start with Custom Situations: Define Your Situation Scenario (4/4)

2023-10-16T12:11:36+02:00

High-level scenario design

A situation scenario represents a business scope from which you can derive multiple use cases (situation templates).

A scenario always has one anchor object that is affected by the situation.

A scenario can have multiple trigger objects that cause the situation.

A scenario refers to a Responsibility Context that is the basis for identifying the users who are informed about situations.

You can derive multiple use cases (situation templates) from one scenario.

The use cases bundled in a scenario need to belong to the same business scope.

The use cases bundled in a scenario need to use data similar to that of the anchor object that is displayed as contextual information on the situation page in the My Situations – Extended app.

Here are some examples of scenarios that support multiple use cases:

A contract can expire, can soon be consumed, or is no longer suggested for use because the performance rating of the supplier has dropped. In all cases, the situation is displayed on the contract.
- The trigger can be the contract itself or the supplier status.
- Relevant contextual information includes the contract details, supplier rating, and contact data.

A flight can be affected by various issues: ticket sales are too low, the eco index is too high, or economy class is overbooked.
- The trigger can be the flight itself or a booking.
- Relevant contextual information includes flight details such as the airline, connection, flight date, ticket sales, and seating information. It also includes booking details such as the booking ID and passenger name

A service appointment is dependent on available material and service staff. A material can be delayed or not be available and need substitution. The service staff might be rescheduled or not be available because of sick leave. Or even worse, there could be issues with the material and the staff.
- The trigger can be the missing material or not enough staff.
- Relevant contextual information includes the material details such as price and delivery period. It can also include staffing details, such as expertise and availability.

In the scenario you also define the custom layout of the My Situations – Extended app that contains the contextual data from the anchor and the trigger object.

List views
- Here you can define custom columns for the anchor and trigger object.
- You can also select fields from the custom columns you want to filter by.

Situation page
- You can define sections for contextual data from the anchor and trigger object, each having a dedicated section with optional subsections.

Note: For SAP S/4HANA you need to activate the ODATA Services for the apps.

Detailed scenario design

Anchor-trigger combinations

When you first design a scenario, I recommend starting with a concrete use case.

Simplest case: variations of a situation case

If you want to start with only one situation case, you simply need to add the objects and their events and actions to the scenario that you need for your use case.

Defining a scenario in addition to the template allows you to easily create variations of your use case.

Example: Expiring License

You want to check the expiration date of a license and have defined a batch-based use case that informs the user one week before the license expires.

Send a warning in advance with instructions on how to proceed best.

By using the same anchor and trigger, you can also derive further use cases (situation templates):

Add a template with enhanced conditions that sends an early warning and another warning close to the expiration date.

Add a template that informs the user that the license has already expired with alternative instructions.

Group situation cases with the same anchor object

If you have identified multiple use cases with the same anchor object you can combine them in one scenario. The use cases can be based on the same or on different trigger objects.

The use cases should use the contextual data from the anchor object because it is used for all derived situation templates. The contextual data from the trigger object is specific but will also be reused for all templates that use the same trigger. In addition to the custom layout of the My Situations – Extended app, the data is also used for filter conditions and variables for situation texts.

If your situation cases use data different from that of the anchor object, the cases probably address different business scopes. If you use the same trigger for multiple use cases but need to display different contextual data to the user, the use cases probably belong to different business scopes. I recommend creating different scenarios with a clear business scope because:

It’s easier for you to think about all the artifacts that you need in order to support the use cases.

It’s easier for other users who create new templates to understand the scope of the scenario.

Enhancing an existing scenario

When you’re familiar with the situation scenario concept, you can start enhancing existing scenarios with further triggers.

Reflect the business scope of your scenario and check whether there might be further elements that would fit the business scope and provide more flexibility for creating situation templates.

Think about further trigger objects that might be relevant.

Add all meaningful trigger object behaviors such as create, update, and delete.

Consider both event-based and batch-based triggers.

With the richness of your scenario the flexibility of derived templates increases, but keep in mind that scenarios need to have a clear business scope to be easily used.

Start from scratch

Finally, you can also start thinking about the pain points of your business processes and derive the related objects.

Cluster pain points belonging to the same business scope.

Identify the objects that are involved in a business scope.

Define the relevant data from the objects that is needed to configure conditions and to inform the end user about the situation details.

Refine the relationships of the objects.

Which objects are affected by a situation (anchor object)?

Which objects trigger a situation (trigger object)?

Which object data is relevant?

Group objects with the same data.

Pain points that affect the same anchor object and focus on the same data qualify for a scenario.

Responsibility context

A scenario is assigned to a responsibility context. The context includes team categories and / or rules that determine the users who are informed about a situation.

Recipients by teams are identified by the team category. Each team configured in Responsibility Management with the corresponding category is informed about the situation. You can use filters to narrow down the target group and inform only specific team members.

Recipients by rules are typically used for the identification of creators, approvers, and so on.

Follow these steps to configure the responsibility context and the related artifacts.

Context: You can assign standard contexts to your scenario or custom contexts that are created with the Manage Responsibility Contexts

Teams: You can use standard team categories or custom team categories that you create with the Manage Team Categories Custom team categories require a custom context and you need to configure team types, responsibility definitions and functions with CBC, and you need a custom context.

Rules: You can use standard rules or create custom rules with the Manage Responsibility Rules The custom logic is implemented via a BAdI. The rule definition is twofold:
- The responsibility context includes the unique agent rules that contain the data source mapping. The agent rules are then mapped to responsibility rules.
- The responsibility rules include a rule ID and parameters and they can be mapped to multiple agent rules.

End user actions

The scenario should include all reasonable actions that are supported by its objects. The actions are displayed on the situation page of the My Situations – Extended app.

Callback actions that are displayed as Solution Proposals.

Navigation actions that are displayed as Related Applications.

You have two options for configuring the actions:

Anchor object actions can be configured as General Actions. That means they are available for all anchor-trigger combinations.

Trigger object actions are always trigger-specific.

Custom layout of My Situations – Extended

In the scenario you also define the layout of the situation page and content for the custom list views of the My Situations – Extended app. It’s based on the data of the anchor and trigger objects.

Anchor object – the data is used for all use cases derived from the scenario:
- Key Information fields on the landing page of the My Situations – Extended app (when selecting All scenarios)
- Column for the anchor object on the scenario-specific list view
- Anchor object section on the situation page

Trigger object – the data is trigger-specific and changes according to the triggers:
- Key Information fields on the landing page of the My Situations – Extended app (when selecting All scenarios)
- Column for the trigger object on the scenario-specific list view
- Trigger object section on the situation page

For all custom labels, including the name of the scenario, please refer to the Situation Handling Framework – UI Text Guidelines.

Check again whether the layout matches the business scope and the use cases you want to cover with the scenario.

Now you know everything there is to know about starting with your custom situation cases.

How to Start with Custom Situations: High-Level Design of the Use Case (1/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Detailed Design of the Use Case (2/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Design the Situation Object (3/4)

How to Start with Custom Situations: Define Your Scenario (4/4)

Take the next step and start your configuration. The blog post series Custom Situation Cases: Configure Your Own Use Cases (1/6) might also be of help to you.

Additionally, you can refer to:

SAP Help Portal: Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Responsibility Management

SAP Community: Intelligent Situation Handling

How you analyze and optimize using the Monitor Situations - Extended app

2023-11-13T10:01:39+01:00

Did you know that you can run an in-depth analysis of Situation Handling with the Monitor Situations – Extended app?

For example, take a look at your projects: Which ones are internal and which ones are external? With an optimization of your configuration with the Manage Situation Types – Extended app and the analysis using the Monitor Situations – Extended app, you will be able to draw better conclusions about your changing business processes.

Let’s quickly check where you are so far: You’ve discovered the extended framework, modelled your own situation use cases, and maybe you’ve already monitored them – well done. You might have captured all issues for a use case in one situation type. Now you may ask yourself, “How can I analyze situations on a deeper level?”. Either the number of situation instances created may be too big for a decent analysis or the use case has a certain characteristic that you want to analyze in-depth.

Here's the answer: For both cases, the solution is to split the general situation type into several smaller ones, which improves the analysis.

My name is Joerg Rett, and I work on data and analytics for Situation Handling. In this blog post, I’ll show you how you use the Monitor Situations – Extended app to improve the configuration of custom situations.

Use the Monitor Situations – Extended app to compare variants of situation types

When you start with Situation Handling for your use case it might be difficult to judge the configuration beforehand. You might not be able to foresee how many situation instances will be created in the days to come. That’s why you may have chosen a configuration that doesn’t overwhelm the responsible user with too many notifications, but makes sure they don’t miss out on important issues requiring their attention. Most of all, you want to make sure you can analyze how issues progress over time using your configuration.

Let’s look at some examples: Picture this, you’ve configured a situation type that informs your colleagues about purchase contracts which are about to expire. Since the number of new situation instances has been increasing recently, you might ask yourself, are the issues involving value contracts or quantity contracts increasing?

Or consider this: You’ve configured a situation type that informs project managers about commercial projects which are still insufficiently staffed. The number of created situation instances has been increasing here too. This time you might ask yourself, are the number of issues for internal projects or customer projects increasing?

Remember, a situation template serves as a blueprint for creating a situation type and includes all the elements that you need to define your use case. The number of situation instances that are detected depends mostly on the conditions defined in the situation type. In other words, conditions are the control buttons you use to influence the sensitivity of situation types.

You can use this not only to limit or increase the number of situation instances but also to create two or more situation type variants with different condition filter settings. How can this help? By comparing these situation types with each other over time, you can see whether a certain characteristic causes an increase in the number of issues.

Monitor Situations – Extended is the right app for this kind of analysis on a finer granularity. Want to see how that's done? Keep reading. Let’s take a look at the use case "Unstaffed Resource Requests for Projects” presented by Ana Gonçalves in her blog post.

Unstaffed Resource Requests for Projects

A short recap: Project managers need to plan their resources to manage their projects. Resource management also includes staffing personnel accordingly. If projects are not staffed in a timely manner, they can be delayed.

Here, Situation Handling helps inform project managers about projects with unstaffed resources at a specific time before the start date.

Imagine the number of issues is slowly increasing.

How would you become aware about this?

You’ll have a look into the Monitor Situations – Extended app.

Analyzing timelines in Monitor Situations – Extended

Once you open Monitor Situations – Extended you’ll see a line chart with the number of activities for situation instances per day for the current year. So, the first step is to drill down into the situation type that relates to the use case of "Unstaffed Resource Requests for Projects”. The situation type ID, here YY1_UNST_RESOURCE_REQUEST_2_ALL_PROJ, will be your first filter setting.

Since when has the number of issues been slowly increasing? You don’t know? Maybe start with a small time range like Last and use it in the Activity Date/Time filter field. In contrast to the predecessor app, Monitor Situations described in my earlier blog post, in Monitor Situations – Extended you can benefit from the Smart Filter Bar with DateRangeType which already comes with a lot of predefined date ranges.

Since you want to see the trend for newly created situation instances, you can continue with the Activity Type filter, restricting it to Instances . Situation instances can be created only once while activities that update the instance can occur several times.

You won’t need the other filter fields, such as Instance Status, Anc. Obj. Sem. Key and Anc. Obj. Key Text, so remove them to have a bit more space for the chart and the table. This is useful if you’re working with devices that have a small display.

After choosing Go, you’ll see the time-series data for situation instance activities in the smart chart and smart table. If you’d prefer a column chart rather than a line chart, you can adjust it in the chart area with the chart icon.

You can already see that the number of newly occurring situation instances is increasing.

Now it’s time to prepare an in-depth analysis of the situation instances and check whether the increase is for customer projects, internal projects, or both types of projects.

How could you get more insight into this?

Use the Manage Situation Type – Extended app to create variants of situation types

The idea is to create two variants of an existing situation type, one for customer projects and one for internal projects, and to disable the existing one. This way you can visualize how the variants compare against each other and the existing one.

The process is fast and simple. Just mark the existing situation type which deals with all project types in Manage Situation Types – Extended, here YY1_UNST_RESOURCE_REQUEST_2_ALL_PROJ, and select Copy. Once the object page opens, you provide a different situation type ID, such as YY1_UNST_RESOURCE_REQUEST_2_CUST_PROJ, and adjust the name and description accordingly.

You create the variation of the situation type in the section Situation Triggers / Batch-Based Trigger. The name of the trigger is still Periodical Resource Request Check, but in the Conditions section you add an additional filter for the Project Type.

The value is set to C for customer project.

As this situation type will react only on resource requests regarding customer projects, you can also adjust the message text.

Finally, you can also adjust the Navigation Actions by removing the link to the app to maintain internal projects.

After you’ve saved and enabled the type, you do exactly the same thing again, but this time for an internal project by setting the filter to I for Project Type.

At this point you have three situation types enabled, two specialized types, one for internal projects, one for customer projects, and one general for both projects.

Since you didn’t change Batch Job Scheduling, all types will look for new or changed situation instances as defined in the general type, for example, once a day.

If you left them all enabled, new situation instances would be created twice, along with the notifications. So, the first thing you want to do is to disable the general situation type responsible for all projects. This is YY1_UNST_RESOURCE_REQUEST_2_ALL_PROJ. If you do this, new situation instances will be created only for the two specialized situation types.

But what about the existing situation instances in the general situation type? Well, you have to delete them. Otherwise these situation instances would be replicated for the two specialized situation types during the upcoming batch trigger. As a consequence, the business user would see two situation texts for the same business object.

You can do this in the Manage Situation Types – Extended app by selecting Manage Instances.

There you select all Instances and choose Delete.

You could also have deleted the whole general situation type and with it all its situation instances. In this case you would have also lost the historic data of the respective activities. In the following section you’ll see that it makes sense to keep those historic activities to better analyze the trend.

As previously mentioned, the batch job scheduling of the two specialized situation types will take place twice a day. To judge whether the trend continues, you’ll need to collect data for several days.

Finally, after collecting data for four days you go back to the Monitor Situations – Extended app.

Comparing variations of situation types with Monitor Situations – Extended app

First, you adapt the filter area and choose Adapt Filters and then Sit. Template ID as an additional field. The fields Instance Status, Anc. Obj. Sem. Key, and Anc. Obj. Key you have already removed previously. With the Sit. Template ID filter you can narrow down the data to those types related to the "Unstaffed Resource Requests for Projects” use case. With the filter for Situation Type ID, you can look at data from a single type.

If you’re familiar with the filter fields of the predecessor app, Monitor Situations, you’ll see that the number of fields has increased. This provides new drill-down options and new insights. For example, instead of filtering by the situation type IDs, you can now filter by situation template. This is the same for the general and the specialized types.

Some fields have simplified labels, for example, Description of Activity Type was renamed to Activity Type. The source that indicates who or what triggers an activity like has been renamed from Description of Activity Trigger to Activity Source.

Back to your analysis. Now that you selected the fields, let’s use them. First choose a Sit. Template ID like YY1_UNSTAFFED_RESOURCE_REQUESTS_2 to capture all situation types that you’ve copied from this template. This means you need to leave the Situation Type ID field empty.

To see the effect of a single general type versus two specialized types even better, choose the stacked column chart for the chart area.

Great! Now you can clearly see that it’s the number of situation instances created for the customer project that is increasing day by day. The number for the internal projects remains constant.

Analyzing and optimizing the use of the Monitor Situations - Extended app – a short summary

The key take-away for you is that the Monitor Situations – Extended app lets you evaluate whether the occurrence of situations is a trend. Once you’ve gained insights, you can create variants of a situation type by adding a condition to the Manage Situation Types – Extended app. Finally, you can further investigate the behavior of these types through the Monitor Situations – Extended app.
In this example you have seen an analysis of time series data for eleven days. Imagine that if you increase the time period to one year you might be also able to observe seasonal effects.

In this example you also saw that the number of issues were increasing. Instead, you might observe some peaks in the data that can pose a problem to your business process and require further investigation of the root cause.

The control buttons you have been using to influence the sensitivity of situation types are the filter elements of the type’s conditions. This means that you can create only situation types variants based on the available filter elements. Which elements are available is determined by the situation objects the scenario uses. Ultimately, the situation object depends on the underlying CDS views. So, it’s wise to take future data analysis into consideration when you’re creating your own custom CDS views as shown in Ana Gonçalves’ blog post.

Want to learn more or refresh your knowledge about Situation Handling?

More blog posts about Situation Handling are available:

Custom Situation Cases: Configure your own use cases (1/6)

The Power of Reuse – Custom Situation Configuration

Fine-Tuning Custom Situations: Closing Behavior of Situation Instances

Fine-Tuning of Custom Situations: Configure the Layout of My Situations – Extended

Custom Situation Handling Use Case for Professional Services: Unstaffed Resource Requests

For more information, see SAP Help Portal for Situation Handling – Extended Framework for SAP S/4HANA and SAP Community for Intelligent Situation Handling. We welcome your valuable feedback.

Situation Handling をSAP BTP上のIntelligent Situation Automationでカスタム拡張する

2023-11-17T09:46:11+01:00

はじめに

Intelligent Situation Automationは、SAP BTP上で提供されているサービスです。SAP S/4HANA Cloudの「 Situation Handling (状況処理) 」が業務上の状況を検知してユーザーに通知を行い、特定の作業を促すものであるのに対し、「 Intelligent Situation Automation 」は、Situation Handlingから受け取った状況に関する情報に基づいて、特定のタスクを自動実行します。

今回のブログでは、「入庫予定数量の不足検知と、代替サプライヤへの購買発注」という拡張シナリオにて、Intelligent Situation Automationの活用シナリオの例をご紹介します。また、この拡張を実装する上での注意点につきましてもまとめておりますので、ぜひ最後までご覧ください。

本活用シナリオの概要

今回のシナリオは以下の図の通りとなります。

シナリオ概要

従来の業務プロセスではマンパワーで発注の欠陥を発見して処理が必要であったところを、
SAP S/4HANA CloudのSituation HandlingとIntelligent Situation Automationの組み合わせを活用することにより、半自動的に欠陥をカバーするタスクを実行することが可能です。これにより、業務が抱える異常をいち早く検知し、リスク回避と業務効率化の両面から正常な業務の遂行をサポートします。

実装アーキテクチャ

今回の実装シナリオのアーキテクチャ

先にアーキテクチャ図を用いて全体を俯瞰してみましょう。基本は図中に注釈のある通りとなりますので、ここでは技術的な補足点をいくつか述べていきます。

Situation Handlingから渡ってくるコンテキスト
Situation Handlingで作成されたSituationに関する情報がEvent Mesh、Intelligent Situation Automationへと渡ってきます。その内容は、Intelligent Situation Automationの「状況の分析」アプリから「状況インスタンス」の詳細を開くことで、「データコンテキスト」タブから確認できます。

データコンテキストの確認

SAP Build Process AutomationのAPIに関する制約とCAPアプリによるデータ調整
SAP Build Process Automationに用意されているREST APIは、以下のような形での入力をサポートしています。

{

  "definitionId": "<ワークフローのID>",

  "context": {

    "<ワークフロー内で定義された入力パラメータ>"

  }

}

https://api.sap.com/api/SPA_Workflow_Runtime/path/post_v1_workflow_instances

一方、Intelligent Situation Automationから送信されるデータコンテキストは次のように一定です。

{

   "input": {

      "dataContext": "<Situationタイプごとに定義されている出力パラメータ>"

   }

}

従って、CAPアプリやSAP Integration Suite – Cloud Integration等のミドルウェアを挟んで、パラメータを整形・マッピングする必要があります。今回のCAPアプリケーションでは、内部で次のようにデータ整形を行なっています。

try {

			const payload = JSON.parse(req.body.input.dataContext);

			console.log("[INFO] Payload successfully parsed as follows: ", payload);



			const data = {

				definitionId: "<SAP Build Process AutomationでデプロイしたワークフローのID>",

				context: {

					"companycode": payload.I_PURCHASEORDERITEMAPI01.I_PURCHASEORDERAPI01.COMPANYCODE,

					"purchaseorder": payload.I_PURCHASEORDERITEMAPI01.PURCHASEORDER,

					"quantity": String(Number(payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.ORDEREDQUANTITY) - Number(payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.CONFIRMEDQUANTITY)),

					"material": payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.MATERIAL,

					"purchasinggroup": payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASINGGROUP,

					"purchasingorganization": payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PURCHASINGORGANIZATION,

					"plant": payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.PLANT,

					"supplier": payload.I_POSITNCONFQTYDEFICIT.SUPPLIER

				}

			}



			const SBPA = await cds.connect.to("SBPA");

			const response = await SBPA.send({

				method: 'POST',

				path: '/workflow/rest/v1/workflow-instances',

				data: data

			})

            res.send(`SBPA instance has been started: ${response.id}`);

		} catch (err) {

			console.log(`[Error] error has been caught while starting SBPA instance: ${err}`);

            res.status(500);

            res.send(`[Error] error has been caught while starting SBPA instance: ${err}`);

		}

個別のSituationの種類ごとの具体的なdataContextの内容についてはIntelligent Situation Automationの「状況自動化の管理」アプリからご確認ください。

カスタムCDSビューの活用
今回のシナリオでは、「購買伝票の情報」と「サプライヤの詳細情報」という2つのエンティティからデータを取得しています。しかしSAP Build Process Automation側から2回APIを呼び出すのは手間であるため、今回はカスタムCDSビューを利用しています。幸い、これらは互いに「サプライヤID」というキーによって結び付けられており、それを基準にしてそれぞれのエンティティに用意されたCDSビュー同士を結合することができます。この結果をODataとして公開することで、SAP Build Process Automation側から1回APIを呼び出すだけでデータを効率的に読み取ることが可能となりました。

実機デモ

今回のシナリオについて、デモ動画をご用意しました。ぜひご覧ください。

検証を通して見えてきたIntelligent Situation Automationの全体像

本デモシナリオの実装・検証を通して見えてきた、Intelligent Situation Automationの全体像について、自分なりに図式化して、動作機序を視覚的にまとめてみます。

Intelligent Situation Automationの全体像

Intelligent Situation Automationは大きく以下の2つのコンポーネントから成り立っているようです。

オートメーション
Situation Handlingからコンテキストデータを受け付け、条件判定を行うコンポーネント。コンテキストの値に応じてアクションの呼び出し、または外部REST APIの呼び出しが可能。なおこの際には、出力するデータを変更することはできない。どういったデータを出力するのかに関しては「状況自動化の管理」アプリから確認可能。

アクション
外部のOData APIが受けられるプロパティをmetadataから取得しコンテキストのデータをマッピングした上でリクエストを送信する。

これを踏まえ、以下に動作機序をまとめます。

Situation Handling からIntelligent Situation AutomationにXXXというコンテキストが渡される

Intelligent Situation Automationはオートメーションでコンテキストを受け、規定の条件判定を行ってアクションを決定する
- 判定結果に応じて「アクション」コンポーネントを呼び出すか、「CUSTOM_ACTION」を呼び出すかを選択できる
- 「アクション」が選択された場合、アクションはODataのmetadataに対してコンテキストのパラメータをマッピングしてエンドポイントにデータを送信する
- 「CUSTOM_ACTION」が選択された場合、外部のREST APIに規定のデータコンテキストを送信する（上記jsonをご参照ください）

【2023/11現在】 Intelligent Situation Automationによる拡張を実装する上での留意事項

ここに記載された内容は2023年11月時点での検証の結果明らかになったことであり、将来時点で状況が異なる可能性がある点には十分ご注意ください。

SAP S/4HANA Cloud の中に定義された「状況タイプ」のうち、現在 Intelligent Situation Automation で拡張できるのは以下SAP Helpに記載のある一部のシナリオのみ。
https://help.sap.com/docs/intelligent-situation-automation/using-intelligent-situation-automation/use-cases-for-intelligent-situation-automation?locale=en-US&version=1.0

Situation Handling内では、S/4HANA Cloudにおけるユーザーへの通知、もしくはIntelligent Situation AutomationへのSituationデータの送信のどちらかのみを設定できる。双方の同時有効化はできない。
https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_S4HANA_CLOUD/0e602d466b99490187fcbb30d1dc897c/f1a8c585e3ca4132b3ae595fde3ee58b.html?locale=ja-JP

Intelligent Situation Automation と同じリージョンにて、SAP Event Mesh
(2023/11時点ではAWS – EUのみ) のサブスクライブが完了している必要がある

「オートメーション」のみの実装では、REST APIに対して規定のパラメータを送ることのみ可能。従って、SAP Integration Suite等の外部ミドルウェアでパラメータの整形が必要。

「アクション」では OData API の呼び出しが可能であり、$metadata を活用してパラメータのマッピングが可能。ただし、呼び出し先のAPIは、OData V2にのみ対応している。

参考文献

SAP Help Portal（Intelligent Situation Automation）
https://help.sap.com/docs/intelligent-situation-automation?locale=en-US

Intelligent Situation Automationとは何か？
https://blogs.sap.com/2021/08/06/intelligent-situation-automation-the-next-big-step-in-digital-transformation/

Intelligent Situation Automationからコンテキストを受け取るカスタムCAPアプリケーションの作成
https://blogs.sap.com/2023/06/27/use-custom-action-in-intelligent-situation-automation-to-resolve-situation-type-quantity-deficit-in-supplier-delivery/

おわりに

本記事では、SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Situation Handling / SAP Intelligent Situation Automation / SAP Build Process Automation の3つの製品とカスタムCAPアプリによる拡張シナリオをご紹介しました。

Situation Handling in Procurement Processes - Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery

2023-12-06T23:39:34+01:00

As a procurement professional, have you ever faced the challenges of lacking visibility into the fulfillment status of your purchase orders or receiving late updates on short shipments from suppliers? As a material planner, have you ever faced a shortage of inventory causing disruptions and bottlenecks in the MRP and production processes?

Time and again, these issues are discovered too late, disrupting downstream operations in material planning, production, and customer order fulfillment. What if there were a way to receive automatic and timely notifications, enabling prompt corrective actions?

Introducing Situation Handling

Situation Handling is a ready-to-use function in SAP S/4HANA that automatically checks for inefficiencies and bottlenecks and can proactively alert users via SAP Fiori notifications. In this blog, we’ll focus specifically on how leveraging Situation Handling use cases for Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery may alleviate pain points in your procurement processes:

1. Automatic Check for Pending Supplier Confirmation

Traditionally, purchasers manually run the Monitor Supplier Confirmation app periodically to check on the confirmation status. It’s easy to overlook this task while juggling other business critical tasks and expect on-time and in-full deliveries from historically reliable suppliers. However, we’ve all witnessed the disruptions and unpredictability of the supply chain in recent years. There’s significant risk to such anomalies not captured in time and it’s more critical now than ever to put in place automated monitoring capabilities.

With Situation Handling for Pending Supplier Confirmation, SAP can automatically check for any purchase document pending supplier confirmations within the monitoring period (part of the standard Sourcing and Procurement configuration). The results align with those of the Monitor Supplier Confirmation report so that if a confirmation has not been received or if the confirmation was received but not in full, that is, a pending quantity exists, then a situation instance is raised.

Figure 1: Two situation instances for Pending Supplier Confirmation were raised.

Figure 2: Monitor Supplier Confirmation app displaying the purchase orders corresponding to the situation instances.

2. Automatic Check for Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery

Much like the Situation Handling use case for Pending Supplier Confirmation, Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery also checks for purchase order items:

With missing supplier confirmations within the monitoring period

With received supplier confirmations but not in full

Figure 3: Two situation instances for Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery were raised.

The key difference between the two use cases, as explained by the product owners, is that Pending Supplier Confirmation is designed to be a collection of items that are pending confirmation and by default provides a summary of how many confirmations are pending. On the other hand, Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery provides a more detailed focus regarding quantity and item level information. Therefore, if the business need is to have a high-level catch all, then Pending Supplier Confirmation may be the use case you want to set up. On the other hand, if the business need is to monitor a specific scenario, such as a strategy material group, then Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery may be the right use case. In both use cases, however, it is possible to navigate to the detailed information by clicking on the notification or the situation instances, which navigates to Monitor Supplier Confirmations app and Purchase Order Item app for the Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery use cases, respectively.

Here is a demo video by Dr. Thomas Reiss, Vice President, SAP User Experience Product Management, on the Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery use case:

3. Proactive Notifications to Appropriate Recipients

By configuring the situation type for the two use cases outlined above, notifications may be enabled for display to recipients on SAP Fiori launchpad.

Figure 4: SAP Fiori notification for Pending Supplier Confirmation.

Figure 5: SAP Fiori notification for Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery.

Note: The notification text may be customized to business needs, and notifications can be configured to display information for individual documents, or at an aggregated level. Clicking on a notification takes you to the related apps, such as Monitor Supplier Confirmations or Manage Purchase Orders, with the relevant purchase documents pre-filtered.

Additionally, filters and recipients are also assigned in the configuration of the situation type. This ensures that the appropriate recipients are notified about issues in the correct subset of purchasing documents.

Pending Supplier Confirmation can be configured with filters on numerous key fields in the purchasing document, such as Company Code, Purchase Organization, Purchasing Group, Plant, Supplier, Material Group, and so on, to restrict the monitoring to those documents. See Figure 6.

Figure 6: Filters on Pending Supplier Confirmation.

Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery can also be configured with filters on certain key fields in the purchasing document, such as Supplier, Material, Deficit Quantity, and so on. However, the options here are limited compared to Pending Supplier Confirmation.

Figure 7: Filters on Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery.

As for how the recipients are assigned, the integration of Responsibility Management and the associated Manage Teams and Responsibilities app makes it possible to do so. These recipients may be assigned based on the Responsibility Definition and Member Functions of enabled Procurement Teams as part of the Responsibility Management set up. For more information on this topic, see link.

Besides the SAP Fiori launchpad notifications, you can also use the My Situations app to access the situation instances. Open situations are displayed and updated automatically after the scheduled batch job runs or as the recipients manually mark each instance as complete after resolution.  

Figure 8: My Situations app displaying open situations.

In summary, Situation Handling use cases for Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery can provide significant value in the supplier confirmation feature of the procurement process. It does so by eliminating the task of monitoring supplier confirmations manually. This allows timelier notifications of pending supplier confirmations and quantity deficits in delivery quantity and frees up the purchasers so they can focus on following up with suppliers and taking care of other business-critical tasks. Ultimately, this leads to a more efficient supply chain, lower inventory and material planning issues, and customer order fulfillment and satisfaction.

Register Now: Share your GenAI use cases for Situation Handling and transform the future of business

2024-02-12T10:51:30.060000+01:00

Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA Cloud automatically notifies the responsible users about critical issues that require their attention. This encompasses various situations, such as upcoming deadlines, delays, expiring contracts, and more.

To address these business challenges and make well-informed decisions, business users often need access to information scattered across different sources, both in and outside the SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.

GenAI steps in, offering practical assistance. Users can use artificial intelligence to access additional information and receive personalized, context-specific recommendations tailored to their roles.

A closer look at decision dynamics

Let's delve into a scenario where Situation Handling automatically informs Kate, the responsible purchaser, about a purchase contract that is about to expire. Before deciding to renew the contract, Kate must consider multiple factors. This involves assessing the company's needs for the ordered materials or services, exploring potential alternative suppliers, evaluating supplier ratings and risks, and taking into account the market price development of the materials or services covered by the contract.

GenAI’s practical assistance

GenAI can further assist Kate by analyzing historical data related to the purchased materials or services and offering insights into market price trends. This empowers her to make more informed, data-driven decisions, ensuring that the contract renewal aligns with the company's objectives.

This is just one example of how Situation Handling and GenAI can transform your daily operations. Now, we want to hear from you!

What challenges do you face, and how can GenAI for Situation Handling be your solution?

Join our Customer Engagement Initiative (CEI) to explore how GenAI for Situation Handling can bring innovative solutions to your business. As we’re in the early stages of development, your input on potential use cases and user experience is crucial for us.

GenAI for Situation Handling

Why engage with us?

You can interact directly with our Situation Handling Product Management and Development team to:

Gain early insights into the planned product features of GenAI for Situation Handling
Influence future requirements by giving valuable first-hand feedback

For additional details about how these engagements work, check out this blog post that highlights a previous project led by our team.

What are the requirements?

To guarantee a successful engagement, you should meet the following prerequisites:

You have a good understanding of Situation Handling.
You are a business expert with an interest in AI and its applications for supporting users in their day-to-day activities.

Want to learn more?

SAP Community: https://pages.community.sap.com/topics/intelligent-situation-handling

Artificial Intelligence meets SAP Customer Engagement Initiative - Register until March 08, 2024!

2024-02-29T17:43:37.723000+01:00

It has never been a more exciting time for AI! Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are dominating headlines and making AI a part of every business conversation.

But what is generative AI?

Generative AI, a form of artificial intelligence, can produce text, images, and varied content based on its training data. At SAP, we integrate this technology with extensive industry-specific data and deep process knowledge to create innovative AI capabilities for the SAP applications you use every day. It’s built-in, relevant to your business, and responsible by design.

The SAP Customer Engagement Initiative enables you as an SAP customer or partner, to get early insights into SAP’s product developments and directly work with the developers to define and shape future product directions. By that we can create solutions that better meet your and other customers’ needs, leveraging process and technology innovations.

Seize this opportunity to participate in our projects with an AI flavor! Register until March 08, 2024:

Visit the Customer Influence website on influence.sap.com for further information.

Interested in other topics as well? Find here the list of all projects.

Follow-up after registration: When you register for a project, you will be invited to an introductory call with the SAP project lead. At this point further participation is optional. Typically, all activities are governed by the Feedback Agreement with SAP.

Thank you in advance for your participation,

Your SAP Customer Engagement Initiative Team

SAP Signavio Process Insights, discovery edition now available in 8 languages!

2024-03-07T21:10:13.039000+01:00

Last month I already shared the the SAP Process Insights, discovery edition is now generally available for all customers.

Starting last week, the discovery edition is now available in 8 languages:
German, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English.

When you log on to SAP Signavio Process Insights, discovery edition, the initial language displayed will be determined by your browser settings. You have the flexibility to switch to another language easily: Open the user profile menu and select your preferred language from the options provided.

This is how the discovery edition looks in German:

Furthermore, the in-app help and the User Guide have also been translated into these languages, ensuring that users can access comprehensive support materials in their preferred language.

The discovery edition is the successor to Process Discovery and Pathfinder on Spotlight, the perfect starting point for your SAP S/4HANA transformation journey, helping you to automate & innovate, and to discover the power of SAP Signavio!

Start your journey to process optimization and transformation now and order your free discovery edition: url.sap/discovery-edition

Gain insights into further detailed description of important news here: OUT NOW: SAP Signavio February 2024 release - SAP Community