Implementing Situation Handling

Situation Handling is a concept for bringing business issues to the attention of specific user groups. It helps the user to recognize, understand, and resolve the situation by gathering all relevant information and proposing solutions.

Frequently, customers want to proactively control their budget before it is exceeded. Warnings from AVC are often routed to the person entering the budget consumption document, which is not necessarily the same person that needs to react on the budget situation. Situation Handling enables customers to proactively react to depleting budget amounts by informing the right group of people. A prerequisite for Situation Handling is the usage of responsibility management for the creation of proper teams with defined responsibility definitions and team member functions (here, it is Monitor Budget).

The following figure shows a first overview of Situation Handling.

The user who receives the notification needs to have the business role SAP_BR_EMPLOYEE assigned. This will give the user the access to the My Situations app.

With the user BUSINESS_PROCESS_SPEC (or the corresponding role), you need to define your teams using the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app using the pre-delivered type S_PSMBMAVC (Budget Management Availability Control).

The team definition needs to be enabled.

In order to define the conditions under which the situation will be raised, the standard user BPC_EXPERT needs to set up a Situation Type using the Manage Situation Types app. Here, you need to copy the Standard Template, PSM_BM_BudgetThresholdExceeded, in order to create your own ready-to-use Situation Type. The Situation Type needs to be enabled before usage.

The following figure shows the header of the Situation Type.

In the Situation Type, you can also format the text which the recipient gets with the situation. It is possible to use the predefined parameters such as the "usage rate before and after the budget consumption" and the control addresses.

The following figure provides you with an example of the display as it is copied from the Situation Template. A very common change would be to delete the unused control objects (for example, functional area).

You can set up different notification formats for system notifications and emails.

Within the Situation Type, the conditions are very important to define under which the situation notifications are generated.

The following figure shows you the set-up of conditions and recipients of the situation.

It is important to note that for each processing order on the left side of the screen, you have a condition on the right side of the screen. You might wonder why you have the Set status to to open twice. This is how you describe the 2 different situations:

1. The action has overspent the budget threshold (for example, previous <70% and current >=70%)
2. The action occurred when the budget was already overspent (for example, previous >=70% and current >=70%)

With this mechanism, you are - for example - able to only send an email when the budget threshold is originally overspent (and not subsequent overspends). With the status, resolved, you can automatically resolve the notification. For example, a document exceeds the threshold, but this document is reversed a second later; then the recipient got a notification, but it is immediately/automatically resolved by the reversal document.

Situation Conditions threshold percentages can differ from the AVC threshold percentages in the tolerance profiles.

Project X has a budget of 100,000 EUR.

You want the project manager to be informed if more than 80,000 EUR has been spent. You also want the project manager to be informed each time the budget usage increases an additional 10%. This means when 80%, 90%, 100%, 110%, and so on, of the budget has been used.

In this case, you should enter 80 for the budget usage rate in the % of Budget Used before First Notification field in the Situation Condition and enter 10 for the usage rate increment in the % Increment for Further Notifications field in the AVC profile.

If you enter 0 for the usage rate increment in the % Increment for Further Notifications field in the AVC profile, or if you leave this field empty, no further notifications are sent.

The following figure displays a user screen that has received a notification. You can see this in the received situation area and on the bell sign on the top-right corner of the screen. Of course situations can be received not only by the AVC situations, but also from other situations.

The following figure displays the complete text when opened. The variables of the configured Situation Display are now replaced with the values of the AVC being performed during the budget consumption posting.

When you click on the situation, you will (per default) drill-down into the My Budget Overview app. In the following figure, you can see that all the parameters from the AVC have been moved into the filters of this app. Consequently, you have a direct view on the budget situation and you can further drill down into all the budget and budget consumption line items from there.

You should be now able to understand the functionality of situation handling.

The key takeaways are as follows:

• Situation handling can inform dedicated teams about budget situations
• While AVC is a prerequisite for situation handling, budget situations can be defined independently from AVC tolerances.