Product Information
Situation Handling – Inform, Insight and Decide
Situation Handling – an integrated automation capability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
SAP Preferred Success has just launched its first Customer Adoption journey for Intelligent Situation Handling (31N). Effective business processes require a high-level of transparency. Transparency in an enterprise system is achieved by combining notifications for early intervention and an intelligent enterprise, which has the capabilities to decode past data with necessary automation. Situation Handling brings urgent and timely information to the attention of the users.
Background on Situation Handling
- It is a technical feature of intelligent ERP and has been available since the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1805 release
- It manages alerts and issues in SAP/S/4HANA Cloud
- It uses notifications to inform specific users of tasks due
- It supports the business in making the right business decisions
- It monitors and adjusts situations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud or with API in external systems
- It enables the automation process
Situation handling brings urgent issues to the attention of specific groups of users who are then able to react immediately to the notifications they receive. This speeds up the handling of specific situations in your company and supports the optimization of your business processes. You can use situation handling to bring important issues to the users’ attention. This helps them focus on specific circumstances and supports the optimization of business processes leveraging the three phases of Intelligent Situation Handling.
The Three Phases of Intelligent Situation Handling
- Inform user proactively
- Use of proactive info to the dedicated user via SAP S/4HANA notification or email
- Use proposed actions in applications
- Get insight into business work
- Collect situation related data
- Monitor activities and status
- Track the actions and analyze the situation from alert to solution
- Use situation data for optimization and automation
- Decide when to use intelligent automation and user expertise
- Use integrated automation to run your use case intelligently
Benefits of Intelligent Situation Handling
- Automatically identify urgent and important issues
- Customers will be able to use intelligent ERP to improve the quality of their manual business processes
- Bring situations to the right groups of users
- Fully integrated in Fiori interaction
- React immediately on notifications
- Intelligent support to make the right decisions
- Enable your user to take right actions
- Monitor and adjust the situations
- Optimize the business processes permanently
- Integrate for automation
- Use the analytical data to improve continuously the intelligent ERP: high quality supported human handling and automation
New Technologies Enable A New Generation of Intelligent Cloud ERP
Situation handling enables your end users to focus on specific circumstances. It leverages:
- Machine learning to reduce mundane tasks and increase business agility
- Intelligent assistants to empower users to focus on what matters
- Predictive analytics to focus more on outcomes than the past
For example, the user gets a heads-up about upcoming deadlines, or are informed about missing supplier confirmations that should be followed-up as soon as possible. Here are several additional use cases in which situation handling provides the greatest business value:
| Line of Business | Use Case | Business Value |
|
Sourcing and Procurement
|
Pending Supplier Confirmation |
For customers into 3rd party business, it is crucial to track that their suppliers deliver goods on time.
|
|
Sourcing and Procurement Finance |
Payment Block and Cash Discount at Risk |
The invoicing process is already a highly automated process. Situation Handling considers exceptions which need manual interaction from purchasers or accounts payable experts. Immediate interaction avoids loss of cash discounts.
|
|
Research &Development Engineering Finance |
(Project) Budget Threshold Exceeded |
This leads to increased transparency, reduced manual effort and an acceleration of corrective measures.
|
|
Sourcing and Procurement
|
PR Item Overdue for Confirmation / Confirm Receipt of Goods |
Exception handling in employee procurement process to follow up with the employee on the delivery date of its requisition to confirm if the product has been delivered. This avoids the loss of cash discounts and blocked credit lines from suppliers for further orders.
|
| Cross Areas | Deviations in GR/IR |
Optimize and speed up of the reconciliation process, when the responsible user gets info proactively about matters that require their attention, who can consequently then react immediately.
|
As of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1905 Release, you can now use situation handling with the following apps:
Finance:
- Reconcile GR/IR Accounts(Fiori ID: F3302; Scope Item: 2V7)
Procurement
- Manage Purchase Contracts(Fiori ID: F1600A; Scope Items: 1QR, BMD)
Cross Applications:
- Data Migration Status(Fiori ID: F3280; Scope Item: BH5)
- Manage Teams and Responsibilities(Fiori ID: F2412; Scope Item: 1NJ)
For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
- My 1905 blog on SAP News here
- Press Announcement on SAP News here
- Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
- Feature Scope Description here
- What’s New here
- Help Portal Product Pagehere
- Implementation Portal here
Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken
Sven,
Great article! Looking forward for the release of 1908 SAP S/4 HANA Cloud.
Is this function going to be available on Onprimse S/4HANA 1809 or 1909?
and what is equivalent to it in the 1709 version ??
Hi Muhammad
Situation Handling is a new floorplan that is considered part of SAP Fiori 3 - so although the floorplan started to exist at SAPUI5 1.62, SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1908 and SAP S/4HANA 1909 have the first delivery of real use cases for situation handling.
You can find them by searching in the SAP S/4HANA What's New Viewer using the terms situation handling or situation template.
We have some collected information in the SAP Fiori for SAP S/4HANA wiki on the All About Apps page.