Discovering SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition Innovations: Situation Handling

As business users go about their daily tasks, there may be certain recurring issues that go unnoticed if they do not recall or manually search information across transactions and applications. Having recurring undiscovered issues such as upcoming deadlines, expiring contracts, pending confirmations or approvals, and approaching thresholds can affect your business. Acting on these situations too late can lead to penalties, whether that means additional costs, frustrated staff, or even loss of customers.

How can we bring these issues to the attention of the right users and avoid negative consequences? Situation Handling supports you effectively handling all kinds of issues in your business. You can select from a wide range of standard use cases both in SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud, public edition with no additional license required.

Situation Handling is a framework within SAP S/4HANA that increases the quality and efficiency of your business processes by detecting exceptional circumstances automatically and informing specific groups of users depending on the defined teams and responsibilities. By bringing these issues to the attention of the right users, we allow them to immediately take follow-up actions, speeding up the resolution of critical business events.

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

• Object-based situations: Situations for a specific business object, such as a contract, a service 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.

• Create a situation type as a copy of a situation template, for example, Procurement use case Contract is Ready as Source of Supply.
  
• 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 email notification) when a condition is met.
  
• Personalize the in-app text that is displayed in the consuming app.
  
• 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.
  
• Define who is responsible for situations, who can see them in the My Situations app, and who receives notifications. Under Responsibility by Teams, you can view which teams are enabled for the situation type. Create Team directly opens the object page for creating a new team in the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app. Under Responsibility Rules, the rule name is directly displayed if there is a rule defined for the template, or you can choose ADD rule. Responsibility rules are preconfigured by SAP but can be enhanced through custom business logic.
  
• Define whether you want to monitor the occurrence and status updates of situation instances by flagging Monitor Instances.
  

Key users can also get insights into the occurrence of situation instances and their lifecycle with the Monitor Situations app, an analytical list page. This includes monitoring capabilities indicating if a user navigated to a situation from a notification or by opening an app directly, as well as providing information about how a situation was resolved. In addition, context data can be extracted with the whitelisted API Business Situation - Read. This can be processed further on any platform, for example, for machine learning purposes. These features are not yet available for message-based situations.

Once the situation type is enabled, Situation Handling uses notifications in the SAP Fiori launchpad to automatically inform specific end users about object-based situations that they need to be aware of and handle as soon as possible. Depending on the use case, the end user can directly navigate from the notification to the app where the business situation is displayed together with related information and related actions to resolve it.

End users can choose to get additional email notifications if needed. From the email notification, the user can either navigate to the launchpad notification or directly to the app that displays the business situation, depending on the implementation. To receive email notifications for object-based situations, you can go to the Settings (in the profile icon), select Notifications from the panel on the left, and check the E-mail option for the required Notification Type. The email address considered is the one defined in the user profile. The email option is only available in the settings after the first notification is received in the SAP Fiori launchpad.

Launchpad and email notifications can be disabled by end users for the selected notification type in the settings. When re-enabling a notification type, the user will only see new notifications received from that time onwards.

Finally, all the open situations can also be displayed in the My Situations app. Similarly to the notification in the SAP Fiori launchpad, you can also navigate to the corresponding business apps where the situation details are displayed and from where you can solve the situations.