Deploying Situation Handling

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

Introduce Situation Handling
Understand the key concepts and features in Situation Handling

Introduction to Situation Handling

This figure provides you with an overview of the monitoring of critical business events. It shows that situation handling is crucial to this process.

In the user's day-to-day job, there may be certain recurring issues that go unnoticed when the user fails to retrieve information or manually searches through transactions and applications. Recurring, undetected issues such as approaching deadlines, expiring contracts, pending confirmations or approvals can impact your business. Reacting too late to these situations can result in penalties, whether it's additional costs or efforts, frustrated employees, or even the loss of customers.

Situation Handling is a framework within SAP S/4HANA that increases the quality and efficiency of your business processes by automatically detecting exceptional situations and notifying specific user groups based on defined teams and responsibilities. By bringing these issues to the attention of the right users, Situation Handling enables them to take immediate follow-up action, accelerating the resolution of critical business events.

A situation captures a current business event, its circumstances, and outcomes. Situation Handling supports the following two types of situations:

Object-based situations: Situations for a specific business object, such as a contract, a purchase order, an invoice, or a material. You can create the conditions that specify when a situation is created, for example, when the status of an object changes or when a threshold is surpassed.
Message-based situations: Situations that refer to warning and error messages occurring in system runs or reports. Instead of defining conditions, you select system messages that create situations.

Key Concepts and Features in Situation Handling

With Situation Handling, SAP provides a wide range of standard situation templates for different business areas. A situation template defines a business situation that you want to bring to the attention of specific employees in your company using the situation handling framework, for example, a pending purchase order confirmation. Standard situation templates are preconfigured by SAP and are intended for specific use cases. The following table contains selected situation templates relevant for purchasing, together with the apps that display the situations:

Situation Template	Description	Situation Template ID	App Name
Predicted Contract Consumption	Purchasers are automatically informed when a purchase contract is about to be consumed. This minimizes the risk of purchasers missing information about full consumption of a purchase contract.	PROC_CONTRACTCONSUMPTNPREDICTION	Manage Purchase Contracts
Contract is Ready as Source of Supply	Operational purchasers are informed automatically when a new or updated contract is available for open purchase requisition items.	PROC_CONTRACTREADYTOUSE_V2	Manage Purchase Requisitions - Professional
Pending Supplier Confirmation	Purchasers are informed about missing supplier confirmations automatically.	PROC_PENDINGSUPPLIERCONF_V2	Monitor Supplier Confirmations
Quantity Deficit in Supplier's Delivery	Purchasers are informed automatically when: Supplier confirmation is missing. Supplier confirmation has been received but a certain quantity of materials out of the total will not be delivered on the scheduled delivery date.	PROC_POITEMCONFQTYDEFICIT	Manage Purchase Orders

This figure provides you with an overview of the following: Situation Handling - Process Overview

Situation templates serve as a blueprint to create situation types. A situation type defines how a situation instance is triggered, who is informed about it, and what actions can be performed to solve it. When creating a situation type based on a template, many of the preconfigured settings can be changed and redefined, including the texts that are shown to the end users when a situation occurs. However, the underlying data structure on which a standard template is based cannot be changed.

Power or key users who have been assigned the Configuration Expert - Business Process Configuration business role can define object-based situation types in the SAP Fiori launchpad using the Manage Situation Types app based on standard situation templates.

The integration with Responsibility Management allows defining the recipients for situation types based on teams or responsibility rules, depending on the use case.

Situation instances of an enabled situation type are generated according to the situation type settings:

For object-based situations: Whenever the conditions defined for the situation type are fulfilled.
For message-based situations: Depends on the run type settings for scheduled application jobs.

When a situation instance occurs, the specified end users can be informed by texts that are displayed through the following various channels:

A list entry in the My Situations and My Situations - Message-Based apps.
A situation message in the corresponding business apps.
An automatic notification in the SAP Fiori launchpad.
Optional e-mail notifications that the end user can opt to receive in the SAP Fiori launchpad's settings.

Note

The last three features are only available for object-based situations.

Key users can monitor the occurrence and status updates of situation instances using the Monitor Situations app.

How to Setup an Object-Based Situation Type

Steps

Open the Manage Situation Types app and create a situation type as a copy of a situation template:
Choose the Situation Templates tab, select a situation template, for example, the PROC_PENDINGSUPPLIERCONF_V2, Pending Supplier Confirmation use case, then choose Copy.
On the New Situation Type screen, maintain Admin Information such as ID, Name, and Display Sequence. If there are several situation types enabled for the same business object, you can define the sequence in which you want to display the situation instances in the situation message.
Define the Conditions based on which situation instances are created, and for which notifications are sent. These can be configured by adding filter values and further conditions or by deleting predefined conditions. By checking Send Notification, you are enabling notifications to be displayed in the SAP Fiori launchpad (and optionally as an e-mail notification) when a condition is met.
In the Batch Job Scheduling section, enter a time zone and a start time for scheduling the batch job, if required.
In the Situation Display section, personalize the in-app text that is displayed in the consuming app.
In the Situation Display section, you can also adjust the notification texts for situations that are displayed in the SAP Fiori launchpad when a situation occurs. Additionally, you can decide if you want to send notifications for each individual situation instance or just one aggregated notification, as well as whether you want to resend notifications whenever open situation instances are updated.
In the Recipients section, define who is responsible for situations, that is, who can see them in the My Situations app and receives notifications.
Under Responsibility by Teams, column Number of Teams, you can view how many teams are enabled for the situation type. When you display the enabled teams in detail, the Create Team button takes you directly to the object page for creating a new team in the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app.
In the Situation Monitoring section, define whether you want to monitor the occurrence and status updates of situation instances by flagging Monitor Instances.
Choose Create and on the Enable Situation Type dialog window, choose Yes to enable the situation type.

Set Up and Test a Situation Handling Use Case

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