Responsibility Management: What Is It and Why Do You Need It? (1/5)

[Gaayathri]

What is Responsibility Management? 

Today’s Intelligent Enterprise requires a way to automatically determine who is responsible for a business process step such as an approval or a change of a contract. Fast-changing environments also require a flexible way of modelling responsibilities.  

Responsibility Management is a framework that automatically identifies the right persons. 

Employees can be responsible for one or more business processes steps, performing one or more key roles in their daily jobs. With Responsibility Management you can map multiple job functions and roles to the same person in a particular business process. You can also group responsibilities uniformly for many people, for example, all purchasers across locations and cost centers, or a dedicated team for strategic purchasers and one for operational purchasers. Responsibilities can also point to a specific person. By defining rules, you can, for instance, find the person who last changed a service order. 

What are the benefits of Responsibility Management? 

With Responsibility Management, you can 

• automatically identify users responsible for a task or activity 
• model teams and responsibilities across organizational hierarchies 
• define responsibilities and member functions in a fine-granular way 
• authorize users for specific contexts 
• create rules to dynamically detect the right person 
• benefit from a flexible configuration to keep up with continuous transitions 

What kind of responsibilities are supported? 

You can, for example, model responsibilities for 

• people from different organizational units working within a project (matrix organization) 
• employees dealing with specific groups of customers 
• the people who last changed a contract 
• substitutes in an approval process 

Where is Responsibility Management used? 

You can use Responsibility Management together with 

• Business Workflow (SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud) 
• SAP Build Business Process Automation (SAP BTP) 
• Situation Handling (SAP S/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA Cloud) 

These frameworks also support the triggering of notifications with detailed information and follow-up tasks.

How does Responsibility Management work?

Responsibility Management supports two concepts: Teams & Functions and Responsibility Rules. Both are embedded in a business context. With Situation Handling you can use simultaneously while Business Workflow uses one or the other.

Teams & Functions 

With the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app you can create teams for specific business contexts. For instance, you model a procurement team that has members with different functions and roles, such as operational purchaser, strategic purchaser, and catalog manager. You can use these member functions as filters, so that, for example, only strategic purchasers are selected to be notified about an activity that requires their attention. 

For larger business units you can also define multiple teams that are responsible for different subareas. These could be different company codes, different suppliers, different plants, and so on. These responsibilities can also be used as filters. If a purchase order assigned to the company code A123 has been changed, only the members of the team with the corresponding responsibility for this company code are selected. 

You can also use combined filters to narrow down the set of relevant persons. Assigning the company code to A123 and the member function to operational purchaser identifies only persons with the corresponding role in the respective team.  

With Teams & Functions you benefit from identification processes being delivered out-of-the-box. You need to model only your team setup. We recommend using this approach for teams with up to 1,000 members. 

Responsibility Rules 

Alternatively, you can determine persons dynamically, for example, the creator of a purchase requisition or the approver of a purchase order. With the Manage Responsibility Rules app you can create your own responsibility rules. In S/4HANA Cloud you use BAdIs and in SAP BTP, you map the responsibility rule to a business rule or an external API call that contains the logic. 

Rules offer a high flexibility and thus come with a higher implementation effort. We recommend creating rules for specific purposes and for teams larger than 1,000 members. 

Responsibility Context 

The responsibility context contains the team and rule definitions and connects them to the business process. For instance, the procurement context contains teams that relate to strategic and operational purchasing and rules that relate to the approvals for purchase requisitions and purchase orders. You map these contexts in the Manage Responsibility Contexts app. 

Interested in learning more? 

Now you have an overview of how Responsibility Management works! Stay tuned for the upcoming blog posts. 

If you want to find out more, check out our next blog posts: 

• Responsibility Management: What Is It and Why Do You Need It? (1/5) 
• Responsibility Management: Create Your Teams (2/5) 
• Responsibility Management: Modify a Team Configuration (3/5) 
• Responsibility Management: Set Up a Team Configuration (4/5) 
• Responsibility Management: Create Your Rules (5/5) 

For more information, see SAP Help Portal for Responsibility Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP Business Technology Platform.