Responsibility Management: Create Your Teams (2/5)

[Gaayathri]

Identifying persons with teams & functions 

You can identify persons based on team responsibilities and their respective roles. Teams come with a predefined configuration and can be created easily. You need to specify only the business areas a team is responsible for and add the team members with the dedicated roles. You can easily adapt the teams to changing requirements. Creating teams comes with a low effort while the process for identifying people comes out-of-the-box. We specifically recommend using Responsibility Management for teams with up to 1,000 persons. 

Sample use case  

Let’s consider a specific use case to illustrate the identification of people across teams and functions. Let’s look at purchasing. You are a reseller of notebooks, mobile phones, and printers. You have different plants, and each team is responsible for specific tasks, material groups, and suppliers as shown in the graphics below.

  Purchasing teams across locations and responsibilities 

In your daily business, several issues and tasks occur that are not related to the organizational setup, but you still need to identify the right persons responsible. For example: 

• You want to identify the persons responsible for a supplier. 
• You want to detect the right purchasers for taking corrective measures when deliveries are late or incomplete. 
• You want to inform operational purchasers when a new or updated contract is available. 

Create the teams   

You create the teams in the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app when you are logged in as a business process specialist or as a business process configuration expert. The app includes several predefined team configurations delivered by SAP. There’s also one for procurement. Let’s see how the team configuration for procurement looks.  

The team configuration of procurement 

The top level of a team configuration is the team category that relates to the business processes of a certain area such as procurement. The team category contains all responsibilities and team functions relevant to the procurement processes. 

Team responsibilities define the matters the team members are responsible for. The Procurement team category includes the company code, material group, and supplier. You can use the responsibilities to filter for specific business objects, such as purchase orders that relate to material group 3000.

Team functions are associated with employee roles. The Procurement team category contains Catalog Management, Operational Purchasing, Strategic Purchasing, and Workflow Administration. You can also use the functions as filters to detect the right persons. 

Team types are sub-categories of team categories and relate to the specific business processes. In Procurement these are Strategic Purchasing (STPUR) and Operational Purchasing (OPPUR). Team types inherit all responsibility definitions and team functions defined for the team category.  

Since team types relate to specific business processes you can adapt the responsibility definitions and team functions. In our example both procurement team types use all the responsibility definitions because they are relevant to all processes. However, the role assignment for the team types differs. While the strategic purchasing team type excludes the operational purchasing role, the operational purchasing team excludes the strategic purchaser role. 

   Team configuration for Procurement  

Create your teams 

Let’s see how to configure our exemplary procurement teams in Bangalore and Chennai with the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app. We’ll create the first team of strategic purchasers. Selecting Create opens an object page.   

Here you choose a meaningful name, for instance, Strategic_Purchasing_1, which also serves as a unique Global ID across systems. For example, if you have the same team in production and quality systems, you need this global ID as a unique reference in all systems. Add a description that illustrates the responsibility of the team and set the status to Enabled so that the team can be detected by Responsibility Management. 

Now you select the type that loads the appropriate team responsibilities. In our example, it’s Strategic Purchasing (STPUR), which automatically displays the category Procurement (PROC).

Defining a strategic purchasing team

Then you specify the team’s responsibilities. In our case, this team is responsible for the suppliers Apple and Samsung. The responsibility is used as a filter to identify the right persons for issues related to these suppliers. And we’ve added the BLR company code for Bangalore. 

Note: If you don’t maintain the responsibility filters, all values are considered.

Adding responsibilities to a team 

As creator of a team you automatically appear as team owner. You are responsible for the team and can be informed with Situation Handling if the status of a team member changes and the  team member is no longer available.

The next step is to assign the team members. Being a team owner doesn’t make you a team member. You need to add all employees, who need to be detected as team members, to the respective section. You can select the employees with a value help dialog that lists all persons maintained as business partners. Then you assign one or more functions to the team members. 

Our sample team consists of Sarah and Saul, who both have the Strategic Purchasing function assigned to them. You also want to add a workflow administrator to this team and assign Walter. 

Save the team and ensure that it’s enabled. 

Assigning team members with their roles 

In our purchasing example we would need to create five more teams: 

• Team Strategic Purchasing 2 is in Bangalore and is responsible for different suppliers. 
  • Responsibility definition 
    • Company code: BLR
    • Suppliers: Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo 
  • Team members 
    • Strategic purchasers: Sarah and Saul  
    • Workflow administrator: Walter 
• Team Catalog Management is in Chennai and is responsible for all suppliers and materials.  
  • Responsibility definition 
    • Company code: CNI 
  • Team members 
    • Catalog managers: Carl and Carla  
    • Workflow administrator: Walter 
• Team Operational Purchasing 1 is in Bangalore and is responsible for notebooks. The responsibilities of the operational purchasing team focus on products. Therefore, we set the responsibility filter accordingly to material group.  
  • Responsibility definition 
    • Company code: BLR 
    • Material group: 1000 
  • Team members 
    • Operational purchasers: Nora and Norman 
    • Workflow administrator: Wang 
• Team Operational Purchasing 2 is in Chennai and is responsible for printers.  
  • Responsibility definition 
    • Company Code: CNI 
    • Material group: 2000 
  • Team members 
    • Operational purchasers: Ping and Prathap 
    • Workflow administrator: Wang 
• Team Operational Purchasing 3 is in Chennai and is responsible for mobile phones.  
  • Responsibility definition 
    • Company code: CNI 
    • Material group: 3000 
  • Team members:  
    • Operational purchasers: Mora and Morris 
    • Workflow administrator: Wang 

Hierarchical Teams 

If your teams are organized hierarchically you can model your team configuration accordingly using super teams and sub teams. Just make sure that all teams use the same responsibility filters. In our example, all super- and sub teams must have values for company code, material group, and supplier. None of the team must have additional responsibility filters.  

The responsibility detection starts with the sub team(s) on the bottom. Only if there is no match, the next level team(s) are considered. For example, we have 1 super team and 2 sub teams with the following responsibilities: 

• Super team: all suppliers (Apple, Canon, Epson, HP, Lenovo, Samsung) 
  • Sub team 1: Apple and Lenovo 
  • Sub team 2: Apple and Samsung 

If you search responsible persons for Apple sub team 1 and sub team 2 are detected. 

If you search responsible persons for Lenovo sub team 1 is detected. 

If you search responsible persons for Canon the super team is detected. 

Identify the right person 

Now that we’ve set up the teams, let’s look at a few examples of how the right persons for specific business issues are identified. 

Example 1: Identify all persons impacted by updates regarding the supplier Apple. 

If there are updates regarding a supplier, you need to inform everybody who deals with them. You identify the right group of persons by using the responsibility filter for suppliers. 

Responsibility Management identifies all team members that include the Apple value in the supplier definition. Remember, this also includes teams that have no explicit filter setting as this detects all values.  

The filter Supplier = Apple identifies 8 persons:

Sri, Srini, and Walter from the Strategic Purchasing 1 team

Carl, Carla, and Walter from the Catalog Management team (supplier = empty) 

Nora, Norman, and Wang from the Operational Purchasing 1 team 

Mora, Morris, and Wang from the Operational Purchasing 3 team 

Walter and Wang are members of separate two teams but are included only once in the result set. 

Identify team members responsible for the supplier Apple 

Example 2: Identify the contact persons responsible for Apple. 

Now you want to narrow down the set of people to just those who are in contact with Apple and who negotiate contracts. This relates to the function Strategic Purchasing. This means you need two filters. 

The responsibility filter Supplier = Apple and the team member filter Functions = Strategic Purchasing identify 2 people: 

Sri and Srini from the Strategic Purchasing 1 team 

 Identify strategic purchasers responsible for the supplier Apple 

Example 3: Identify persons dealing with notebooks. 

Next you want to identify the people who deal with notebooks on the operational level. First you need to filter for material group 1000. Since the filter material group is only maintained for operational purchasing teams but not for other teams (no filter = all), you need an additional filter that detects only operational purchasers. 

The filter Material Group = 1000 and the filter Functions = Operational Purchasing identifies 2 people: 

Nora and Norman from the Operational Purchasing 1 team 

Identify operational purchasers responsible for the material 1000 

Example 4: Identify all operational purchasers located in Chennai. 

Finally, you want to identify all persons who work as operational purchasers in Chennai. The location is represented by the company code, and you need to filter for the corresponding roles. 

The filter Company Code = CNI and the filter Functions = Operational Purchasing identifies 4 persons: 

• Ping and Prathap from the Operational Purchasing 2 team 
• Mora and Morris from the Operational Purchasing 3 team 

The Operational Purchasing 1 team is ignored because its company code is BLR. 

Now you know how teams and functions work in Responsibility Management. 

Identify operational purchasers in Chennai 

Interested in learning more? 

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.