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Hi All,
As we move towards a clean core and an intelligent enterprise, we need a standard framework which can alert the user about the tasks which need their attention. With Responsibility management in S/4 HANA, SAP provides a standard set of apps which will be used to configure teams, assign members and create agent determination rules for standard as well as custom workflows.
OVERVIEW
Common Approaches:
In any S/4 HANA project, there are multiple scenarios where customers need to determine agents for approval of purchase order, invoices, sales order, billing document, Master data creation/change etc. For each of these processes we use different ways to determine agents, like BADI, BRF+ and custom tables.
Challenges:
All of these methods of determining agents depend on IT teams for configuration and coding, as well as not very user friendly for the end user to setup agent determination rules. The current approaches are not very scalable, especially with side-by-side scenarios running SAP BTP ABAP environment
In comes Responsibility management.... With this SAP provides a standard framework to create teams and assign members for various scenarios running either on stack or side by side on SAP BTP.
For more details, please refer to the standard documentation here
MAIN CONTENT
In the scenario which we will cover today, the workflow runs in SAP Build Process Automation and the teams are created in S/4 HANA and exposed via ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model API.
But before that a quick overview of the terms to be used in the blog
Team category: It is the classification of team by business processes like Finance, supply chain etc.
Team Type: Each team category can have multiple team types, it's breakdown of team by business process like, Finance team for USA and Finance team for UK.
Responsibility Attributes: The attributes based on which teams will be created and members will be assigned to the team.
There are standard team types, team category & responsibility definitions which SAP provides to cater to different scenarios, however in my case I have created custom responsibility definitions, team category and team types.
1. Create a custom team category using Manage team categories app. The team category name will be prefixed by default by identifier which is configured in ABAP transport organizer (ATO). For my case it was ZZ1.
2. Create a team type and assign it to the custom team category.
3. Create custom responsibility definition. To create custom responsibility definition, you have to create CDS views and assign them to the team category.
2. This CDS view has 2 backend tables, one for code and other for text. On top of these 2 tables, 2 CDS views are created.
4. Function and Function profile needs to be created, this is required to assign the team members to a particular team. The functions can also be used for controlling authorizations, however in this case we are only using functions as a pre-requisite step to create members of a team.
5. Create the team using Manage team and responsibilities app. Once you select a particular team type automatically all the responsibilities assigned to the team category will automatically show up and you can provide the necessary values.
Each of the team member will be business partner. For each SU01 user a corresponding BP needs to be created, then only it will show up in this app.
6. These teams are stored in backend tables but for easy access there are standard data definitions. These can be used in your ABAP code.
7. To expose these teams to external applications which are running side-by-side your S/4 HANA core, standard API's are available. Detailed documentation can be found here.
8. In our case we have created a RAP API using custom entity, to extract the team's data along with some additional parameters and send it to SBPA via a pull mechanism.
PS: The details of RAP API are not part of this blog.
CONCLUSION:
Responsibility management provides a one stop solution for all your agent determination needs. It can help consolidate process and application specific agent determination requirements into a single application. It would help in removing data silos for agent determination rules, provides a scalable framework which can be used across SAP applications with proper authorizations.
Please free to share your thoughts and reach out to me if you have any questions.
SAP S/4HANA SAP BTP ABAP environment SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model
Regards
Anirban
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