From eDocument Cockpit to Manage Electronic Documents: Better user experience, more powerful features

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Background

The transition from SAP GUI to SAP Fiori brings new business value of SAP S/4HANA, including modern user experience, new business processes, intelligent automation capabilities, etc. When it comes down to document compliance, the transaction edoc_cockpit within SAP GUI and the Fiori app Manage Electronic Documents deals with the same set of business problems, but with the latter providing stronger user experience. This evolution follows all the Fiori Design Principles:  Role-based, Adaptive, Coherent, Simple, Delightful, and it was never a simple facelift, but a redesign and an upgrade both visually and functionally.

This blog gives a rough comparison between the transaction edoc_cockpit and the Fiori app Manage Electronic Documents.

You could check out:

• A Walkthrough of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance App: Manage Electronic Documents


• Error Analysis in Manage Electronic Documents

for a deep dive into the new Fiori app.

 

Differences between eDocument Cockpit & Manage Electronic Documents

Visuals

eDocument Cockpit follows the old-fashioned user interface in SAP GUI. It has only one page, with a result overview on the left and a document list on the right. By clicking on a single document, we would be brought to a detail page, which is actually the transaction/t-code of that eDoc's source document. It is relatively hard for a business user to get an overview of all eDocuments and to know where someone's at with this whole situation. When the scale goes large, recognizing and dealing with faulty eDocuments could also be overwhelming.

edoc_cockpit Landing Page

Source Document Detail Page

 

Manage Electronic Documents app provides a light-weight Fiori UI compared with the cockpit.

• The Overview Page provides the big picture of all country scenarios so that the business user would have a general idea about current status of different eDocument processes.


• When clicking into a single document, the document flow is well articulated under History tab, error messages are shown under Logs tab.


• Error Analysis Page makes it possible for business users to handle eDocuments with the same error code in bulk.

Overview Page in Manage Electronic Documents

Document List Page in Manage Electronic Documents

Document Detail Page - History in Manage Electronic Documents

Document Detail Page - Logs in Manage Electronic Documents

Error Analysis Page in Manage Electronic Documents

 

Functionality

The following table summarizes the countries/regions that Manage Electronic Documents currently supports. To find a detailed business tasks supported list, check out here for Cloud 2208, and here for OP 2021 Latest.

S/4HANA Cloud 2208	S/4HANA OP 2021 Latest
Countries/regions adopting Peppol, including: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden Colombia, Italy, Saudi Arabia, Spain	Countries/regions adopting Peppol, including: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Sweden Italy, Spain

Functional-wise, I extracted some of the main feature upgrades from the cockpit to the Fiori app. For more improvements in the latest Cloud version 2208, please look into this Help Portal Page.

Feature	Manage Electronic Documents	eDocument Cockpit
Error Analysis	Provides interface and application logs as well as an Error Analysis page. The Error Analysis page collects all the electronic documents with errors. You can do the following on this page: View electronic documents with errors by custom error category and error code The error messages for each electronic document are displayed. For external errors only: View business-oriented error information only, which is extracted from error messages Note The Error Analysis page is currently not available for electronic documents in Saudi Arabia and Colombia for Cloud 2208.	Provides interface and application logs. You can view the interface and application logs for an electronic document in a pane next to the document list.
Document Details	Provides a Document Details page, enabling you to view all the details about an electronic document, including: Basic document data, such as process status, company code, and creator History Log File list You can view or download a file from this page.	Provides document details in the SAP List Viewer. To view document history and file lists, you use the History option under the Goto menu.
Status Overview with Document Counts	Landing Page Shows the total numbers of electronic documents with each completion status (In Process, Error, Completed). Allows you to filter electronic documents by completion status easily. Document List Page Shows the total number of electronic documents with each process status. Allows you to filter electronic documents by process status easily.	Provides filters in the SAP List Viewer that enable you to find out electronic documents with a specific status. To get document counts, you have to count manually or export the list to a spreadsheet.
Status Overview Through a Flow Chart	Shows a detailed status overview and the total number of documents with each process status in a flow chart.	Not available
Filtering of Actions	You can only click the buttons of the actions that are allowed in a scenario. The buttons of the unallowed actions are either grayed out or don't appear on the screen.	Not available

 

Key Takeaway

To abstract up, Manage Electronic Documents mainly improves in two aspects:

• Visual monitoring of eDocument processes for more intuitive experience


• Error Analysis that groups all error documents by error code to simplify further error handling actions

It goes beyond a UI upgrade, but is revamped, with much greater usability and efficiency.

Want to learn more?

• A Walkthrough of SAP Document and Reporting Compliance App: Manage Electronic Documents


• Error Analysis in Manage Electronic Documents


• https://community.sap.com/topics/document-reporting-compliance

Hope you find this blog helpful! Let me know in the comments section if you have any question 😉