Explaining Responsibility Management

For SAP S/4HANA applications, there is the need to uniformly and centrally determine the person or entity who could be held responsible for completing a particular task or activity. The recommended most flexible and most common way to offer configure recipient options is via Responsibility Management (RM) Artifacts. This allows the usage of Teams, Teamfunctions, and agentrules. In addition, it also enables the (cloud) customer to extend the existing rules via an extension implementation (BAdI). Depending on the attributes of a task, task type or activity type, entities (such as org, cost center, IO, plant, stock location), and the scenario, the determination of responsibles (agents) is performed. The integration of responsibility management enables the customer to define own teams, team functions and rules as part of the system configuration. These entities are automatically exposed via the scenario as agent rules and can be used to define the recipients for a particular activity. This feature is available in the Manage Workflows, Workflow Component, and Manage Workflow Templates apps.

Responsibility management is integrated by exposing agent rules, team functions, and teams defined in the responsibility framework depending on the S/4HANA release.

To enable this feature for the scenario, a Team Category has to be defined in the Properties group of the Control tab. A Team Category defines the use case for the scenario, and therefore the eligible agents. Team functions defined for the Team Category will be always provided for the definition of a workflow. If the Exposure of teams checkbox is set, the defined Team entities (for the particular Team Category) will also be exposed. If available and exposed, the Team Functions and Teams will be selectable in the role drop-down of the step details while defining a workflow step in the SAP Fiori application (for example, Manage Workflows, Workflow Component, and Manage Workflow Templates).

Enablement of RM is also possible for previously delivered scenarios. For this use case, the Activate Unified Responsibility Management button is visible in the Properties section of the Control tab. The activation of RM can't be undone; therefore, it is recommended to generate a new version of the scenario before performing this action (outside the flexible block definition in the Scenario Menu→Generate Version).

The figure shows a screenshot displaying the team category and callback classes in the flexible block.

RM functionality in SAP S/4HANA Cloud or SAP S/4HANA on premise at design time and runtime is only active if the WF_UNIFIED_RESPONSIBILITY_MANAGEMENT feature toggle is active for the client (and user) in the system. As of S/4HANA Cloud 1808 or S/4HANA OnPrem 1809 the framework is only used if the feature toggle WF_UNIFIED_RESPONSIBILITY_MANAGEMENT is active for the client (and user).

As of S/4HANA Cloud, public edition 1902 or S/4HANA OnPrem 1909 the feature toggle was removed and unified responsibility management functionality is active by default. (The fields in the control tab are no longer visible; the mapping of the team category to a scenario, and if desired the exposure of teams, must be done in responsibility management via the view cluster RSM_VC_CNTXT_AGENTRULE_MAP_S).

The customizing can be launched directly from the Agent Rules Tab in the scenario builder (click on the Rule-Button). See Screenshot below.

The figure shows the entry screen of the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app.

For many business areas, responsibility determination is irrelevant along the line or organizational structure. When responsibility can be defined, business objects are not always reflected in the organizational structure. Because it was historically cumbersome to make changes, the organizational structure was complex to manage. With the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app, you can define the correct contact for various contexts to address tasks and activities with the working structure.

For each of these uses cases several scenarios are available.

Actual we support three different kind of use cases.

1. Use of a whole Team and the team members as agents
2. Use of Roles leveraging functions defined and assigned to team members
3. Use rules for agent determination, for example, Manager of an employee

For the first use case you need to create the team in a staged environment with the exact same technical name

RM offers a possibility to extend Agent determination. You can extend standard rules and also build custom responsibility definitions and functions. Therefor the apps "Manage Responsibility Rules" and "Manage Responsibility Contexts" are available as well as enhancement spot RSM_ES_STATIC_RULE. There you define the responsible agents over a BAdI-Implementation. In "Manage Responsibility Context" a standard rule can be extended with a custom rule and BAdI implementation is called during runtime.

IMG Path is Cross Application Components -> General Application Functions -> Responsibility Management

This is a corresponding service that runs on SAP Business Technology Platform and manages responsibilities for roles and teams.