If a company uses supply protection in advanced Available-to-Promise (aATP) in SAP S/4HANA, the intention is to define protected quantities for dedicated groups. The groups are defined by several characteristics belonging to sales documents or stock transport orders and their related business partners.
The protection should be a restriction to all other demands, so that these quantities are available for the protected groups, even in case of a shortage situation. Setting up supply protection is quite flexible. Customers can protect channels, countries, customer groups, orders by their delivery priority, and so on.
It is possible to combine all these attributes. As supply protection is flexible and as complex scenarios can be created, it is also possible that protection has results that are not intended.
One not intended result is the “multiple match”. One sales order can match multiple supply protection objects as the order has matching attributes of different supply protection objects. In this case, the sales order does not only match different supply protection objects, but it will also consume from different supply protection objects. This might be an issue, as the order reduces the stock one time, but the protection will be reduced multiple times (once per match).

Multiple Matches
Therefore, it would be nice to get an alert for every case, when a demand consumes from different supply protection objects (or groups).
In this case, Situation Management is used to detect exactly this situation: one document (sales order or stock transport order) consumes from more than one protection group.
The user is informed about this situation and can navigate to the related supply protection objects.
Situation Management can be used very flexible, and the multiple matches alert is only one example for the usage of Situations in supply protection.
Example
To get these multiple matches alerts, you can use the predefined situation type template CA_ATP_SUP_MULTIMATCH. You start the Fiori app “Manage Situation Types” and you copy there the situation type template CA_ATP_SUP_MULTIMATCH to a new situation type, for example, with the name ZSCN_SUP_MULTIMATCH.

Copy Situation Type Template
This situation type is based on batch scheduling, thus you maintain the time zone and the point in time, when the multiple matches situations shall be detected.
You can also change the text of the alerts on this page for the different alert channels, for example, for e-mail, message, and notification.
At the end of the page, you define the recipients for the alerts with the help of responsibility management. Here, the team type “RFM” is predefined.

Define Recipients with Responsibility Management
Please check the details, for example, necessary roles or regarding responsibility management on the in SAP Help Portal:
When you have changed the situation type, you select “Create” and you enable the situation type, when you are asked to.

Enable the situation type
To test the situation type, you can choose function “Trigger”. That means that the batch to detect multiple matches starts directly. After some minutes you will get the list of detected multiple matches. From this list, you can navigate to the related supply protection objects.

Trigger execution of situation type

Result of a manual trigger
If you have maintained the responsibility teams, you will also be notified in the Fiori Launchpad about these situations.
Do you also have examples where Situation Management could be helpful in the context of Supply Protection?
Situation Management in General
How to restrict detected situations?
You can use filters to reduce the number of alerts. One example is to filter the alerts by plant or organization structure. This helps you to focus on the relevant alerts.
How to monitor situations?
You can also check situations in the situation monitor as not all situations raise an alert.

Situation Handling related Fiori Apps
Additional Information