Responsibility Management in Flexible Workflow

Purpose

This blog explains using responsibility management to configure a team of purchasing managers to approve Purchase requisitions based on certain criteria.

Overview

Imagine a case where in a purchasing department, purchasers usually create purchase requisitions to buy certain items. Approvers for the different purchase requisitions usually are not the defined roles like Manager, Manager’s manager etc. Usually different group of purchasing managers are responsible for approvals based on criteria like Plant, Material Group etc

We can achieve the above using Responsibility Management by defining different teams based on values of criteria like Plant, Material Group etc as shown below.

Detailed Steps

Step 1 – Define Teams and Assign Functions in app “Manage Teams and Responsibilities”

1. Login as Business Configuration Expert.

2. Access app Manage Teams and Responsibilities – Procurement under Purchasing Configuration

3. Click on Create.

4. Give the name and description for your new team.

5. For Team Type, Choose Operational Purchasing

6. Once you select the team type, you will see the responsibility definitions getting loaded

7. Enter the attributes that the team are responsible for each definition. For example: The new team was configured with the below configuration :

The above configuration tells the responsibility of the team is for Material Group A001 and Plant 1010.

8. Assign the owners of the team.

9. Assign the members of the team.

10. Click on Manage Functions. Map which members are responsible for which functions.

11. Click on Save. New Team is created.

Step 2 – Define new workflow based on Responsibility Management

Currently approval based on responsibility management is available only for item level approval of Purchase Requisitions

1. 1. Login as Business Configuration Expert. Create a new workflow using app – Manage Workflow for Purchase Requisitions – New for scenario Release of Purchase Requisition Item

1. 2. Mention Start Conditions

1. 3. Choose the relevant function(in this case à Operational Purchasing) in Role.

1.

1. 4. Save and activate the workflow

Step 3 – Check Approvers in Purchase Requisition

If we now create a purchase requisition with an item belonging to Material Group A001 and for Plant 1010, approvers will be picked from the above configured team in Responsibility Management as seen below.

Points to be noted:-

• The same function associated with the team members shall be used in the step definition of workflow in the section Recipients –> Role. Otherwise, the approval will not be triggered for the step to the relevant team members as highlighted in green in below screen shots.

Functions in Team:-

Same Function in workflow step definition:-

For more details on managing Teams and Responsibilities please refer SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Responsibility Management