Using Responsibility Teams in Situation Handling (1/2)

[angelika_salmen]

Situation Handling

Situation Handling is a framework in SAP S/4HANA Cloud that automatically informs the right users about issues requiring their attention. Situation Handling identifies the users by using integrated Responsibility Management. The blog post series Responsibility Management: What Is It and Why Do You Need It? (1/5) describes in detail how Responsibility Management works. This blog post series illustrates how Situation Handling and Responsibility Management work and in hand. The first blog post shows you how to inform the right persons about situations using responsibility teams. The examples are based on the extended framework for Situation Handling.

Sample use case

Let’s take a sample use case to illustrate how the right persons are informed about situations. We want to create situations for purchase contracts that are about to expire. The purchasing use case is also discussed in the blog post Responsibility Management: Create Your Teams. This blog post illustrates nicely how the identification of persons works for a fictional reseller’s purchasing unit. Let’s use the same example again. The reseller deals with notebooks, mobile phones, and printers. The purchasing teams in Bangalore and Chennai are responsible for specific tasks, material groups, and suppliers as shown below.

Sample procurement teams

Link between Situation Handling and Responsibility Management

The link between Situation Handling and Responsibility Management is the responsibility context. You choose the context when configuring a situation scenario. The context includes one or more team categories that you can choose from when creating a situation template.

Situation scenario

As an extensibility specialist you create your situation scenario with the Manage Situation Scenarios app. The scenario defines a business scope for an object that can be affected by situations. It comes with multiple elements such as situation triggers and actions to solve situations. The situation scenario is assigned to a responsibility context that includes corresponding team configurations for the business scope. In our example it’s PROC_PURCHASECONTRACT. The responsibility context type SITO (Situation Object) is assigned automatically.

Assign a responsibility context to a situation scenario

Situation template

As a business process configuration expert you configure your Situation Handling use cases with the Manage Situation Types – Extended app. This includes conditions for when situations are triggered, informative texts for the business users, and the situation recipients.

Define recipients of situations in a situation template

In the situation template you select a team category that is part of the responsibility context. The team category represents a business process, for instance, Procurement. It can have one or more team types that relate to specific aspects of the business process such as strategic purchasing and operational purchasing. The team category is assigned in the situation template that serves as a blueprint.

The team category also includes all responsibility definitions and member functions and are inherited to its team types. You can use the responsibilities and functions as filters when you create the situation type.

Situation Handling takes only enabled teams into account. You can see the team names when you select Enabled Teams in the Recipients section. View All Teams takes you to the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app. Here you see all teams that belong to a team category, and you can change their status, for instance, from disabled to enabled.

View all teams that belong to the category in the Manage Teams and Responsibilities app

Overview of Responsibility Management

Here’s a simplified overview of a team category within a responsibility context.

Simplified view of Responsibility Management

Situation conditions and recipient filters

Condition filters are used to detect situations. Let’s take the situation template Expiration of Purchase Contracts (PROC_ABOUT_TO_EXPIRE_CTR). You create a situation type from it and need to specify when to trigger a situation for an expiring contract. You define a corresponding condition for the anchor object, that is for the purchase contract.

Condition filter: Validity Period End = NEXT 30 DAYS.

Define condition filters

If this is the only condition filter, then all purchase contracts that expire within the next 30 days are taken into account.

Recipient filters are used to identify the persons who need to be informed about situations. You can choose filters by responsibility definition and by member function in a situation type. If you don’t set a filter for the recipients, then all enabled teams belonging to the team category will be informed about all expiring purchase contracts.

Define recipient filters for teams

Now let’s see how to use filters to inform the right persons.

Configure situation detection with condition filters

You can use the condition filters to fine tune the detection of situations. The available filters are the fields from the anchor CDS view and the trigger CDS view (which are not flagged as hidden fields in the situation scenario). You can choose as many filters as you like. By the way, when you start testing, I recommend using filters to get a decent number of situations.

Business-specific situation types

In our reseller example, the bestselling products are from the suppliers Apple and Lenovo. If a contract from these suppliers is about to expire, you’ll want to get a heads-up far enough in advance to avoid any risks, such as running out of stock. You create a situation type with these conditions:

Situation Type 1

• Suppliers: Apple, Lenovo
• Validity period end: next 30 days

Condition filters for situation type 1

For the other suppliers, it’s enough to detect expiring contracts two weeks before the expiration date. You create another situation type with these conditions:

Situation Type 2

• Supplier: Canon, Epson, HP, Samsung
• Validity period end: next 14 days

Condition filters for situation type 2

If you don’t add recipient filters, all enabled teams are informed 30 days before a contract with Apple or Lenovo expires. And all enabled teams are informed 14 days before a contract with one of the other suppliers expires.

Inform the right person about a situation

Responsibility Management offers two kinds of filters: the responsibility of a team and the function of a team member. To illustrate the effects, we take expiring contracts with the suppliers Apple, Canon, and Lenovo into account.

Responsibility filters

The responsibility filters are defined with the team category, in our example procurement. To achieve effective filtering, you need to consider the responsibilities you defined for the procurement teams. As described in the blog post Responsibility Management: Create Your Teams, the defined procurement teams use three responsibility definitions: Company Code, Material Group, and Supplier. If you use other filters, they don’t have an effect because empty responsibility definitions in teams are considered to be responsible for everything.

You also need to consider the fields from the anchor CDS view which are the attributes of the situation instance. If a responsibility filter doesn’t relate to an attribute of a situation instance, the filter won’t work either. For example, the situation template Expiration of Purchase Contracts (PROC_ABOUT_TO_EXPIRE_CTR) does not contain the filter Material Group in the anchor object conditions. Using the filter Material Group in the responsibility definitions would have no effect because it’s not an attribute of the situation instance.

You can combine multiple responsibility definitions which refine the filtering. To keep it simple, we only use the filter Supplier.

Responsibility definitions as filters

If we use only the responsibility filter Supplier and have no further condition filter other than Next 30 Days defined, the following teams are identified as responsible for the supplier of the specific expiring contract.

These teams are informed about an expiring contract with the supplier Apple:

• Strategic Purchasing 1, responsible for Apple and Samsung
• Operational Purchasing 1, responsible for Apple, Lenovo, and Samsung
• Operational Purchasing 3, responsible for Apple and Samsung
• Catalog Management, responsible for all suppliers

These teams are informed about an expiring contract with the supplier Canon:

• Strategic Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo
• Operational Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, and HP
• Catalog Management, responsible for all suppliers

These teams are informed about an expiring contract with the supplier Lenovo:

• Strategic Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo
• Operational Purchasing 1, responsible for Apple, Lenovo, and Samsung
• Catalog Management, responsible for all suppliers

Identify team members by responsibilities

Member function filters

Another option is to filter the recipients by their functions. The functions are also defined with the team category. The team category Procurement contains four member functions: Catalog Management, Operational Purchasing, Strategic Purchasing, and Workflow Administration.

You can combine multiple member functions, which refines filtering. To keep it simple, we only use one filter: Strategic Purchasing.

Member functions as filters

If we use only the function filter Strategic Purchasing, have no further condition filter other than Next 30 Days defined, and no responsibility filters, all persons with that function are informed about the situation.

These strategic purchasers are informed about all expiring contracts regardless of the supplier.

• Sri and Srini, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 1
• Sarah and Saul, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 2

Identify team members by functions

Combine responsibility and function filters

Of course, you can also combine the responsibility and function filters. Let’s set Supplier as the responsibility filter and Strategic Purchasing as the function filter. Again, no further condition filter other than Next 30 Days is defined.

Responsibilities and member functions as filters

With these settings you get the following result:

These strategic purchasers are informed about an expiring contract with the supplier Apple:

• Sri and Srini, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 1, responsible for Apple and Samsung

These strategic purchasers are informed about an expiring contract with the supplier Canon:

• Sarah and Saul, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo

These strategic purchasers are informed about an expiring contract with the supplier Lenovo:

• Sarah and Saul, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo

Identify team members by responsibilities and functions

Combine condition filters and recipient filters

Now, let’s take another step forward and use additional condition filters. Above, we introduced two situation types using the condition filters Validity Period End and Supplier.

Condition filters of situation type 1

• Suppliers: Apple, Lenovo
• Validity period end: next 30 days

Condition filters of situation type 2

• Supplier: Canon, Epson, HP, Samsung
• Validity period end: next 14 days

If we add the recipient filters Responsibility = Supplier and Member Function = Strategic Purchasing, we achieve a fine-granular detection of who will be informed about a situation.

These strategic purchasers are informed 30 days before a contract with the supplier Apple expires:

• Sri and Srini, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 1, responsible for Apple and Samsung

These strategic purchasers are informed 14 days before a contract with the supplier Canon expires:

• Sarah and Saul, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo

These strategic purchasers are informed 30 days before a contract with the supplier Lenovo expires:

• Sarah and Saul, strategic purchasers from Strategic Purchasing 2, responsible for Canon, Epson, HP, and Lenovo

Inform the right team members at the right point in time about situations

Now you know everything you need to know to set up your teams for Situation Handling. The next blog post shows you how to use responsibility rules in Situation Handling.

For more information, you can also refer to

SAP Help Portal

• Responsibility Management in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA
• Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA

SAP Community for Intelligent Situation Handling