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SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA – Which notification to use when – Workflow, Situation Handling, KPIs, etc

Jocelyn_Dart
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert
a month ago
2,510

TL;DR – Know when to use which SAP Fiori notifications.  That is, workflow versus situation handling versus Smart Business KPI subscriptions versus process-specific notifications, and which technique to use if you need to create clean core custom notifications.  

A very common business requirement is to notify someone that something has happened and, if possible, get them started on responding to it. 

  • In classic SAP ECC you would use typically workflow notifications and/or email notifications. Unfortunately, over time this often led to a flood of emails, emails being ignored, and increasingly poor response times.
  • In SAP S/4HANA there are a range of more useful, more nuanced, notification techniques available in SAP Fiori that encourage prompt action. You can optionally send them as push notifications to your tablet or phone. These notifications don’t flood your email inbox, however if you want email notifications, you can optionally echo selected notifications to email.

These notifications are deliberately difficult to miss! You will find your notifications in a variety of places, including the notification center of the SAP Fiori launchpad as shown in the example below: 

Jocelyn_Dart_0-1747880021996.png

Why this blog series?  During workshops with one my recent customers currently in transition to SAP S/4HANA, we came across a point of confusion. They are very interested in using Situation Handling but were getting confused about when to use Situation Handling versus Workflow versus some other notification technique. In this blog you will find the different notification techniques explained and when to use them. 

There is a quick summary of the SAP Fiori notification techniques discussed in this blog post in the image below. These techniques are also listed in the table later in this blog post in section SAP Notification Techniques in SAP S/4HANA and when to use them.

Jocelyn_Dart_1-1747876810651.png

In this first blog post, you will learn:

  • Part 1 - SAP Fiori notification techniques available in SAP S/4HANA and when to use them; when to use email notifications to complement or supplement SAP Fiori notifications. 

Later in this blog series you will learn:

In part 2 you will learn where notifications are visible in the SAP Fiori launchpad of SAP S/4HANA and elsewhere such as: SAP Fiori app F0862 My Inbox, SAP Fiori app F6511 My Outbox, SAP Fiori app F4154 My Situations, SAP Fiori app F4537 My Situations - Extended, SAP Build Work Zone,  SAP Task Center, SAP Mobile Start, and elsewhere.

You will also look under the covers at what your team needs to do to enable notifications.

Further references: 

  • For the difference between classic workflows, flexible workflows, and related cloud workflow techniques in SAP BTP refer to SAP Help - ABAP Platform - Workflow
  • For the difference between workflow and situations, and the difference between standard vs extended situations, refer to SAP Help – SAP S/4HANA – Process Management and Integration – Situation Handling - FAQ.
  • For understanding Smart Business KPIs refer to SAP Help - SAP S/4HANA - Analytics - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
  • Although much has changed, there is still some useful background information in our earlier blog post SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA - Notification Center - Part 1 - Activation 

 

SAP Notification Techniques in SAP S/4HANA and when to use them

In the table below, you will find the 4 main SAP Fiori notification techniques to choose from based on your use case.

Use Case

Example

Notification Technique

Configured By

Notify an approver they have an approvals task

Notify approver of a new Purchase Order requiring their approval

Workflow notifications - flexible workflow (preferred) or classic workflow (supported)

Key User or UX Architect

Notify a business expert of a business situation to be resolved

 

Notify someone that: a contract is about to expire; a batch job has failed with a business-critical error, etc.

Situation Handling notifications - standard or extended

Key User or UX Architect

Notify that a KPI will soon be/has been exceeded target threshold

Notify the responsible manager that actual budget has reached 90% of planned budget

Smart Business KPI notifications

Key User or Analytics Specialist

Notify someone that a process has completed successfully

Notify Purchaser of the number of PRs automatically converted to POs today

Process-specific notifications

Administrator 

When choosing between these notification types the main factors to consider are:

  • Traceability – Where you have very strict highly-controlled processes – such as approvals (also known as delegations of authority) - workflow notifications provide end-to-end traceability of every step of the process. You can find the status of the approval at any time and have an audit trail history (via the workflow log) of what has occurred including who was involved in each task.
  • Productivity – When working with business experts, you want them to know a business situation has happened and to be supported in how to resolve the business situation.  However, you don’t want the business expert to feel micro-managed as that could make them less productive and even impact their mental health!  Situation handling is the right choice here to aid swift resolution while showing that you trust the business expert to take the appropriate action. You can find the status of the situation’s business object at any time, which situation type was triggered, and which team was involved. The user acting on the business object is deliberately not tracked by the situation, however if they have made a change to a business object that will be tracked, as usual, in the change log history of the relevant business object.
  • Expected Response –
    • Workflow notifications require a strict response – for example, the approver must approve or reject a purchase order. 
    • Situation notifications require a flexible response, the business expert must decide what is the appropriate action to take to resolve the situation.
    • Most other notifications – both Smart Business KPIs and process-specific notifications – are primarily about keeping people informed with no specific response needed.
  • Notification source – To make sure the recipient is notified as quickly as possible, it makes sense to trigger the notification from the workflow, situation, KPI or process that first identifies the need for the notification. 
    • Often there are predefined notification providers that provide easy options to configure & trigger these notifications.  
    • Where you don’t have a predefined notification provider, creating a custom notification provider is a relatively easy task for a developer, and worth considering.

 

Understanding the Effort required to Configure Notifications

Skills needed for configuring all predefined notification use cases are LOW. 

Creating your own custom notifications is a LOW to MEDIUM effort for a Developer with a small amount of configuration required by an Administrator.

 

When to use email notifications instead of SAP Fiori notifications

There are 2 additional notification use cases that commonly occur. While they may seem like separate notification types, they are essentially just variations of the notification types listed above. In these cases, an email notification is more likely to be required. These also are LOW effort to configure. 

 

Use Case

Example

How to Handle

Configured By

Notify a casual employee that something has occurred

Notify a user who doesn’t login very often

 

User needs to login at least to the SAP Fiori launchpad. They can go to their personal Settings & opt to echo notifications to email. That is, in the User Actions > Settings > Notifications area. They can only configure notification types they have received at least once.

Business User

Notify an external person that something has occurred

 

Notify a supplier that a quote has been accepted

 

In this situation, the external person does not have access to the SAP Fiori launchpad.  Where needed, notifications to external suppliers are typically included in process-specific notifications. 

Key User or Functional Consultant

 

Sending aggregated email notifications of SAP Fiori notifications

For notifications where a response is expected, you may want to notify the user by multiple channels.

For workflow notifications the Workflow Extended Notifications (program SWN_SELSEN) is still available and can be scheduled as a batch program. You configure workflow extended notifications transactions SWN_CONFIG and SWNADMIN. You can include a link to SAP Fiori app F0862 My Inbox in the email.

Hint: To minimize searching through emails for past notifications, you should consider adding app F6511 My Outbox to all users who have My Inbox. My Outbox enables users to view the workflow log and task log of workflows they have been involved in, allowing them to see what happened before/after their involvement.

For situations, in app F2947 Manage Situation Types or F5437 Manage Situation Types – Extended, you can configure the option to send an email for aggregated notifications.

Refer to

 

Notification techniques to avoid

Avoid using classic SAP Business Workflow “Display Notification” Tasks  - i.e. Task Type = Notification. These classic notifications are only visible in the classic SAP Office Inbox and have very limited features.

 

Becoming a SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA guru

You’ll find much more on our  SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA topic page

Brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG and Customer Care team.

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