Question Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request in Technology Q&A

ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 09:04:46 GMT

Fellow Members,

Would the settings under "Approval Settings" sufficient to receive the email notofocation for Approval Procedure? I performed the activities and what I see is workflow/email coming to my SAP Inbox (So01 txn code) but not to my email inbox (outlook). When I see in SCOT, no email is generated for Approval workflow. What could be the reason behind it? Any inputs are appreciated.

Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 11:12:57 GMT

Hi,

1. Could you please check that your outlook email address maintained properly in SU01.

2. Also try to send maill from SAP to outlook regular email settings or correct, sometime might be issue with scot config

Please check

Thanks

Jansi

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 11:30:59 GMT

Hi,

Thanks,

I verfied, both email address and SCOT settings are fine. What I do not understand is, in case of approval mails, I do not see any mails in SCOT txn code under SMTP node. That means, email is not getting generated at first place. So how do I find out whether my approval procedure generating any E Mails?

Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 13:39:33 GMT

Hi Vivek,

Same issue i am facing..I have 2 issues.

a)My change manager is also receiving mails in So01. but he is not receving in his outlook mails.

b)When change manager approves request ,then requestor is not receiving approved mail neither in his So01 inbox nor in outlook mails.

SOST is working fine and i have sent the mails manually.

Kindly advice..

Thanks,

Pankaj

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 13:50:37 GMT

Hi Pankaj,

Let's wait for some expert advice on this. I have a fundamental doubt on whether the IMG activities under "Aproval Settings" enough or any extra configuration required to recieve emails. Unfortunately, there is no clear documentation exists to clarify this.

Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Raquel_PereiradaCunha — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:02:09 GMT

Hi Vivek,

I understand you have set up the steps of "Make workflow settings for Request for Change approval" correct? Is the business partner who needs to receive the email assigned to role Employee with the user id filled? Does this user id have the correct e-mail address in SU01 with communication method "E-mail"?

Regards,

Raquel

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:14:49 GMT

Hello Vivek,

Check your settings in SPPFCADM for conditions configuration if it's triggerd for proper user status.

Actions profile SMCR_ACTIONS or SMHF_ACTIONS.

BR,

SAPFan

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:38:32 GMT

Hi Raquel,

As mentioned by you settings are already maintained. SOST is also working fine if we send mail manually. Only issue is during CHARM workflow.

Kindly advice.

Thanks,

Pankaj

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 14:57:52 GMT

Hi Raquel,

Thanks, Exactly, I have set up the steps of "Make workflow settings for Request for Change approval". The BP are of type Employee with proper Email Id maintained in SU01.

So doea that mean if I perform all the activities under "Approval Settings", should I be receiving emails without any further configuration? Is my assumption correct? or am I missing something here? Pls advice.

Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 07:09:26 GMT

Hi Vivek,

Any luck for outllok mails??

Thanks,

Pankaj

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 12:50:34 GMT

Hi Vivek,

I got the solution. Actually you have to define new action definition for SMCR Action Profile in SPPFCADM. For that new action defined you have to set the condition. Like once SMCR Request is created by requestor, It should trigger mail to Change Manager for approval.

Plz go through this link and Replace SDCR with SMCR transaction type.

http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/d06db8e2-5036-2c10-1a97-dee1364fcec8?overridelayout=true

Thanks

Pankaj

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Raquel_PereiradaCunha — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 20:55:33 GMT

Hi Pankaj,

If you use PPF action to send e-mail, it will work fine but only depending on the status of the whole RfC document, which means the first Change Manager ( the one you defined in the partner dependent field in the action) will receive e-mail when status is set to "to be approved" ( this is the default functionality, no need to set up workflow) but if we have 2 or more steps ( 2 or more approvers) the next approver will not be informed by e-mail when the preceding approver approves the RfC. And the email sent will not have the same contents as the SO01 message, neither will be triggered by the Workflow. I understood this is what Vivek needs. Am I correct Vivek?

As far as I could see, the standard settings only send messages to the Workplace.

Best regards,

Raquel

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

JoycaVervinckt — Wed, 24 Jul 2013 08:27:36 GMT

Hi Vivek,

I have also activated the Workflow CRM_RFC_APRV and was wondering about this "E-Mail to Approvers" step.

First of al, thanks for mentioning that these do appear in SO01.

Then about the actual emails to outlook:

So far, I found out that there is an action in the action profile: SMCR_IT_RFC_CREATE_EMAIL_DOC, which has a setting "Processing Using Selection Report" (most of the time, this is set to "Processing when saving document").

This action has no scheduling or start conditions, but is somehow only triggerd at the start of the approval procedure.

The selection report which is responsible for actually executing the action, is found under transaction CRMC_ACTION_JOB. There you can execute the SMCR_IT_RFC_CREATE_EMAIL_DOC action.

This action will send an email to all the approvers in the approval procedure.

However, this email is very very limited, it only sais:

subject: 8200000089:short description

content: You are one of the partners of this service request. Please keep it updated.

Also, the action creates all emails to all approvers immediately. So if you have a sequence (first IT manager, then business manager, etc) they will all get their emails at the same time.

So I'm not sure yet what the relationship is between the workflow and this action, but they do seem related.

I hope that this info can help you.

Kind regards,

Joyca

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 08:08:55 GMT

Hi Raquel,

Exactly, you read my mind. I was thinking the same too. Inserting 3 more new status (Change Manager Approved, CAB Approved , GMP Approved...etc) just for the sake of receiving an email via PPF action/status is not a viable solution. This is an option and should not be the ONLY option. The ideal scenario is all the parties involved in approving a CR being notified sequentially while the CR is in the status "To Be Approved".

If this is not present in the standard configuration of ChaRM (as of SP08) then it is a considerable Limitation that I request somebody from SAP Development side should take a look on.

It would have been a great feature in ChaRM if they had something like above in place. This definitely goes to my 'Wishlist' . Do you agree ?

Best Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

prakhar_saxena — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 08:17:39 GMT

Hi Vivek,

I have gone through all the replies and trying to figure out what you want to achieve and it seems you want to trigger an email sequentially to all the approvers right?

I don't think currently anything standard is there so you have to design an ABAP workflow to achieve this via ppf action etc.

As far as design goes if you expect this in standard it should also be included in mobile apps but we know good things comes in small packages(SPs)

Regards

Prakhar

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 09:47:43 GMT

Hi Joyca,

Thanks, for the highlighting the relatevely unknown txn code to us.

I explored CRMC_ACTION_JOB txn code to execute SMCR_IT_RFC_CREATE_EMAIL_DOC action. As you mentioned it sends a mail with very limited subject and short description. Is therer any ways in which we customize this action to suit our requirement of recieving emails when the CR is in status "To be Approved".?

The idea is to trigger this action when CR is in status "To be Approved" and all the parties marked as approver for CR receiving emails. I tried scheduling this as a Batch Job but could not reach anywhere.

Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

JoycaVervinckt — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 10:59:45 GMT

Hi Vivek,

I believe that you could change (in a copied version) the action SMCR_IT_RFC_CREATE_EMAIL_DOC to "Processing when saving document" instead of "Processing Using Selection Report", then you don't need to go to the CRMC_ACTION_JOB transaction or create a batch job for it.

Otherwise, I found this discussion about scheduling a batch job for CRMC_ACTION_JOB:
http://scn.sap.com/thread/1730872

But still, this action does not completely cover our needs. While it does send an email to all approvers, it sends the mail to all approvers immediately, and not one by one (e.g. the email to approver 2 should only be sent after approver 1 has given his approval).

I am also thinking towards a different solution.

I'm just thinking aloud here, I have absolutely no idea how much work the following idea would be for a developer. And as you said before, it would be very welcome if SAP themselves would provide such a functionality.

I picked this up on the actions in ITSM, such as SMIN_STD_MAIL_WATCHLIST and SMIN_STD_MAIL_REPORTER.

The schedule conditions there contain for example &NEW_TEXT_FOUND& = X or &STATUS_CHANGE& = X.

These container values are checked via implementations of BaDI CONTAINER_PPF (SE18). In there, there is some code, for example for the check for status change, it goes reading the current status from the buffer, and the previous status from the database, and compares those two.

I do think it would be possible for a developer to write a new implementation with some code that checks if, for example, approval step 1 has already been approved.

Kind regards,

Joyca

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Former Member — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 13:41:28 GMT

This message was moderated.

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Thu, 25 Jul 2013 13:47:31 GMT

Hi Pankaj,

Kindly open a new thread, so that we don't deviate from our original message.

Thanks for understanding.

Regards,

Vivek

Re: ChaRM: Approval Settings - Email Functionality in Change Request

Vivek_Hegde — Fri, 26 Jul 2013 11:17:37 GMT

Hi,

Making use of schedule conditions &NEW_TEXT_FOUND& = X or &STATUS_CHANGE& = X seems to be a good option to begin with.
Condition STATUS_CHANGE = X may not yield the desired result since we want the CR to be in "To be Approved" status itself throughout the approval process.

I am just wondering whether NEW_TEXT_FOUND =X would recognize the "Activity" field under Approval Procedure to arrive at a trigger.

This is my just thought or wishful thinkg? May be.

Regards,
Vivek