Using situation templates in procurement

In the previous lesson you've learned that Situation Handling detects important issues and brings them to the attention of specific groups of users. Therefore, they’re able to react immediately to various business situations.

Let's take a look at the capabilities and applications of situation handling, and how you can configure the situations tailored to your needs.

As a configuration expert, you can monitor all situations and adjust them as needed using the Monitor Situations app. You monitor the handling of situations in your business, including the occurrence and the lifecycle of situation instances with respect to their status and related business objects. You can enter the status, for instance, Open or Resolved, to see how many situations are open or were solved within the selection period.

As an employee using the My Situations (F4154) app you can review and monitor all relevant situations in your area of responsibility. Notifications are only created in the system once the required configurations in the situation template (including notification recipient settings) are set up.

Using this app, you have the following two options:

• Dismiss a situation notification. You can dismiss a situation using an appropriate status:

  • Resolved, if the situation has been completed.

  • Obsolete, if the situation is outdated or no longer valid.

  • Invalid, if you think that the situation was created by mistake.

• Navigate from the situation notification to the situation object page.

Note that this navigation is only possible if you have the business authorization (business role) required to access the underlying business objects.

Teams and Responsibility Setup is important to ensure that there are specialists with the necessary skills and knowledge to handle the situations. These teams can come from various departments or functional areas, or they may hold special roles within the company. The assignment of responsibilities ensures that it is clear who should take action in such situations.

In the following example setup, you can see the team members that are responsible for a specific situation, and their member functions and responsibility definitions.

As a configuration expert, you can define your team setup and areas of responsibility using the Manage Teams and Responsibilities - Procurement app. You can use responsibility definitions and member functions to determine members (recipients) who are responsible for situation handling.

You set up teams and responsibilities as follows:

1. Create a new team and maintain the general information, such as name and description.
2. Define the responsibility definition per team.
3. Add the team members and assign a corresponding function.

In most cases, there are situation templates with predefined settings, which you as a configuration expert can adapt to the respective business needs. You can copy the standard templates and configure situations tailored to your needs using the Manage Situation Types app as follows:

1. Choose a situation template of interest and copy it to create a new situation type.
2. Define the basic settings for your situation type, such as ID, name, and display sequence.
3. Configure the condition and define the filter criteria of your situation type. The filter criteria specify if a situation is triggered or not.
4. Schedule your situation batch job.
5. Define the look and feel of your messages, notifications and email previews:
   • Define if the situations should be aggregated within one notification/email.
   • Define if the situation should be resent each time the batch job is executed.
6. Define the notification recipients. You can define the responsibility definition by teams or select a predefined responsibility rule defined per situation template. To define the responsibility definition by teams, complete the following steps:
   • Responsibility Definition: Select the fields, which are transferred to the teams & responsibility management to identify the responsible team.
   • Member Function: Used to identify the correct user per team.
7. Define if you would like to enable the monitoring functionality for your situation type via the Monitor Situations app.

A user can decide if a certain situation should trigger a notification or an email. That is, once the email and the app notifications are enabled for the condition in the setup, you can decide on the preferred notification channel (launchpad and mail) using the Settings → Notifications on your user Profile.

In the following video, you can watch how to configure the situation Contract Is Ready as Source of Supply in order to notify specific users when a new contract is available for open purchase requisition items:

In the following picture you can see some of the important use cases for situation handling in sourcing and procurement.

You can find the complete list of templates in SAP S/4HANA Cloud Use Cases for Situation Handling. Here you can filter for the templates that are relevant to the Line of Business Sourcing and Procurement, and look up the respective situation handling use cases.