The Core Idea of SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management
Welcome to the "Customizing Output Control in SAP S/4HANA Sales" course. Before we deal with the output control in detail, let's take a step back to understand the core idea of ERP software. The core idea of ERP software is the documentation of business transactions. In addition, ERP software is designed to support or, in the best case, completely automate the processing of these transactions, perhaps through the use of AI. Another aspect is the analysis of the data.
In SAP S/4HANA, business transactions are documented, processed, and evaluated in the form of documents - sales business transactions through sales documents. Shipping activities are triggered and documented by delivery documents. Billing documents or credit memos are represented by invoice documents. Users can access and edit all data at any time, provided they have access to the systems and the corresponding permissions.
However, when carrying out business processes, it is often necessary to exchange information with business partners who do not have direct access to the relevant documents. For this purpose, in SAP S/4HANA, it is possible to issue outputs based on documents. These outputs can be given to business partners. For example, the order placer can receive an order confirmation, a delivery note can be sent to the recipient of goods, or the invoice recipient can receive the invoice.
The Concept of Output Control

On your journey through the course, Jim and Liv will accompany you. You already know them from training S46050. Jim works as an SAP S/4HANA Sales Application Consultant and Liv, a Sales Business Process Owner, is very familiar with the sales business requirements. Liv has received an inquiry from the sales department regarding the issuing of order confirmations.
Watch the following video in which Liv discusses the requirement with Jim.
As you can see in the video, the technical requirement of the sales department is that an order confirmation should be issued directly when a customer order is saved.
To be able to issue outputs associated with documents, you need to define in the document which type(s) of output, for example, at which point in time, to which business partner, on which channel, in which language should be issued. These information are known as output parameters. These are automatically determined when documents are captured.
In SAP S/4HANA Sales, there are essentially two frameworks for this. The SAP S/4HANA output management and the output determination (SD-BF-OC). The output determination (SD-BF-OC) is based on the condition technique and stores the output parameters in an output condition record. The focus of this training is solely on SAP S/4HANA output management. The SAP S/4HANA output management is the successor to all other output management frameworks and is based on the BRFplus. The output parameters are stored in decision tables and are determined based on rules. Without output parameters in the document, no output can be issued. You can see the concept in the following graphic.

Based on the output parameters, the output can be issued immediately when the document is saved or later by running a background job. In the document, the "print outputs" can be displayed in a print preview.
![]() | Let's take a look at the output parameters in sales order 370. |