Name: Using Situations for Managing Service Processes - SAP S/4HANA Service
Uploaded: 2021-1-12
Duration: 602 s
Description: This microlearning explains how you can use the Situation Handling framework for Service in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Service. Using this framework, you can set up and use situations to have the system automatically alert you to critical issues in your service processes.

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<div>This microlearning explains how you can use the Situation Handling framework for Service in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA Service. Using this framework, you can set up and use situations to have the system automatically alert you to critical issues in your service processes.</div>

Using Situations for Managing Service Processes - SAP S/4HANA Service

Hello and welcome to this micro learning session on situation handling in SAP S4HANA service. My name is Anna and I am a user assistance developer. Today I will explain how you can use this intelligent technology to optimize your service processes. In this micro learning session, you will learn what situation handling is, how you can use situations to help the system automatically allot you to critical issues in service processes, and how you can configure situations for your business needs. There are many pain points in service processes. This could be, for example, expiring service contracts, overdue in-house repairs, delays in billing of completed repairs, not completed services, or changed service execution dates. Such issues can be annoying for you and your customers. They can hurt your business and produce extra work. To prevent them, you can use situations to get notified of any issue requiring attention, be it an approaching deadline, a pending task, an exceeding threshold, or any kind of delay. SAP delivers quite a few situations that you can use for different service processes. For example, you can use them for service order and service contract management, in-house repairs, and solution order management. What's more, you can use situations both in SAP S4HANA Cloud and SAP S4HANA. Situation handling makes the system automatically identify urgent issues, brings situations to the right users, and helps them make the right decisions. Apart from simply alerting you directly in the system or by email, a situation lets you take action right away. For example, in case of an expiring service contract, you can directly go to this contract and trigger its renewal. Or in case of an unconfirmed in-house repair, you can navigate straight to the affected transaction and confirm it. Also, situation handling helps to capture data for deeper insights, automation, and further analysis and optimization of your service processes. But now let's have a look directly in the system at how situations work. Imagine you're a customer service manager responsible for in-house repairs. And you need to make sure that all the repairs are on track. Of course, you can just log in to the system, open the relevant app, and check the status of the repairs manually. But this costs time, and there is no guarantee that you won't overlook some critical repairs. To prevent this kind of things, you can use situations to get notified automatically about any critical issue. Where can you see these notifications? You can see situation notifications on SAP Fiori Launchpad in the notification area. Besides, you can also activate email notifications. You can also sort them by date, type, or priority. Here you can also see more details, for example, the IDs of specific repairs and the number of days since they were created in the system. Which details you see depends on how you set up a situation, but we'll come to that in a minute. By the way, you can receive and view notifications no matter in which app you are currently working. You can click the selected notification to navigate to the affected in-house repair and check it. On the Details page of the in-house repair, you can review the details and take action. For example, you might want to contact the Sol2party to clarify any issues that might be preventing the repair from being completed. Here you also see the message with more details and options to close the situation once the issue has been resolved. A process situation needs to be closed so that the system can ignore it next time it checks for open situations. When closing a situation, you can set its status to Resolved, Obsolete, or Invalid depending on why you decided to close it. By the way, to process situations, you can use a special app that I will show you in a minute. In addition to the notification area and in-app situation messages on object pages, situations Transactions also appear next to the critical objects in object lists. Here again, you can view the situation details and navigate straight to the affected transactions. As mentioned before, to monitor and process situations, you can use a special app MySituations, where you can see all current situations for which you are responsible. Here too, you can close situations by changing their status to Resolved, Obsolete, or Invalid. To use this app, you have to add the business role employee situation to your user profile. You probably wonder how you can get notifications like this. You just need to set up a situation based on one of the situation templates that are predefined and delivered by SAP. For this, you need the authorizations of a Business Process Configuration Expert. As a Business Process Configuration Expert, you go to the Manage Situation Types app and look for the required situation template. For our use case, we want to inform users when there's a delay in an in-house repair. In the list of found templates, we select Processing of in-house repair overview. To set up your own situation, you first need to copy the situation template to create a a so-called situation type. As a result, a new situation type page opens. Let's go from top to bottom and see which configuration options you have. First you need to define an ID for your new situation type. You can enter any ID up to 30 characters. Next you need a name. You can use the predefined name or change it as you wish. Later on, you can use the ID and the name to identify your situation type and situation instances in the list of existing situation types. Under Display Sequence, you can set a display order for situation instances of different situation types. A situation of high priority, for example, appears at the top of the list of the situations delivered for a specific business object. You can also define the conditions based on which situation instances are created and for which instances notifications are sent. You can add filter values or delete predefined conditions as required. For example, you might want to detect all in-house repairs that have been in status open for more than 3 days after they were created in the system. Next you select the time and time zone for scheduling jobs to trigger the situation instances. As soon as the bad job is finished, you can see the new instances in the situation instances list. Under Situation display, you define the texts which inform the user about the situation. You can use the predefined texts or change them as needed. Here you can define the texts for messages that you see in the system and for email notifications. You can also provide links to additional information that could help the user to resolve the situation. In secure system notifications, you can also use variables to communicate such sensitive information as IDs, business object values, and so on. Under Recipients, you define who should receive notifications. For this, you can use either Teams or predefined responsibility rules. In our case, the responsibility rules define that the creator and employee responsible will get notified if the system identifies a delayed in-house repair. Finally, under Situation Monitoring, you can define whether you want to monitor the occurrence and status updates of situation instances based on your situation type. Monitoring isn't enabled by default. You need to enable it if you want to use the Monitor Situations app. Now you can confirm the creation of the situation type. it's been created, you need to enable it. Otherwise, the system won't be able to trigger the situations. But you can also do this later on. After you've saved your situation type, you can add or change translations for your notification texts. And if you want to check whether everything works as expected, you can also trigger situations for a situation type right away. You see, the system has already delivered a few situations based on the situation type we've just defined. As a BPC expert, you can also monitor situations that were triggered by the system directly from your situation type. To do this, you need to switch to the Monitor Situations app, where you can find all the situation types and related situation instances. Here you can further analyze and drill down into collective situations data. And that's it. Let's recap. SAP delivers many predefined situation templates for different business use cases. You use these templates to set up your own situation types depending on your business requirements. Based on the situation types you set up, the system triggers situations and sends notification about any issue that requires your attention. This helps to simplify your daily work and improve your customer experience. You can find more information on the SAP Help Portal, in various blogs on situation handling, and finally, in SAP Best Practices Explorer under scope item 31n. Hope you enjoy this micro-learning. Thank you so much for watching.