Situation Handling – How to configure and trigger Situations?

Situation handling is used to bring important circumstances or business situations to your end users’ attention. It automatically identifies urgent and important issues requiring attention and brings to the notification of the responsible users. Situation handling uses responsibility management to notify users. Users can then act immediately. The analytical data collected by Situation handling is used to continuously improve intelligent ERP and therefore optimize the business processes.

In S/4HANA Cloud Sales, there are currently 3 Situation handling uses cases –

Sales Quotation Is Close to Expiring
Situation in Sales Order for Delivery Insights
Sales Contract Fulfillment Alert (new in S/4HANA Cloud 2005)

Let’s take one of the examples – Sales Contract Fulfillment Alert and look at how to configure and trigger Situations –

What is the Business value of situation template – Sales Contract Fulfillment Alert?

With this standard template, users can immediately learn about contracts that are being fulfilled too quickly or too slowly. This enables them to proactively follow up with customers on contract renewal or contract under fulfillment.

How to trigger Situations in Sales Contract?

Step 1 – Create Situation Type
User – BPC_EXPERT
App – Manage Situation Types

• Search for Standard template SD_CONTRACT_FULFILLMENT for Sales Contract Fulfillment Alert
  

• Copy the template by selecting it and clicking on Copy button to adapt it according to business requirements
  

• 1.3 Enter the ID field
  

• Define Conditions by adding relevant filter values
  

• Enter time zone, time to schedule jobs and to trigger Situation instances automatically
  

• When the Situation occurs, the situation instance is informed to an end user in two ways
  – In App Situation Message
  – Notification in SAP Fiori Launchpad

• To display In-App Situation message, enter message text in ‘In-App Situation Message’ section.
  The text of the standard template appears by default in Message Details. This can be overwritten.
  For e.g. to display sales contract number, enter a curly bracket {and select variable SALESCONTRACT from the list of predefined variables displayed.
  The changes made in this section can be previewed real time in Message Preview section
  

• To display the notifications in SAP Fiori launchpad, enter notification text in ‘Secure Notification Details’ section as shown below
  

• Add Notification Recipients who would receive the notifications by clicking on ‘+’ button, then select ‘Sales’ category and member function from drop down. (Refer Step 2 to know how to create Teams and member functions)
  

• In addition, If there is a predefined rule for the Standard template, the rule name is displayed and can be selected by choosing Add Rule
  
  

• If you want to monitor the occurrence and status updates of Sales Contract Situation instance, then you need to check the Monitor Instances checkbox
  

• Save the Situation type and in the pop up, click ‘Yes’ to Enable the Situation
  

• Additionally you could Edit, enable or disable the Situation once the Situation type is created
  

Step 2 – How to create Notification Recipients
User – BPC_EXPERT
App – Manage Teams and Responsibilities

• Click Create
  

• Enter team name, select type – SALES and set Status – Ready to Use
  

• In Team Members, enter business partner (in this case ‘INTERNAL_SALES_REP’ ) and select a member function from drop down. Save the Team
  

Step 3 – How to define Member functions
User – BPC_EXPERT
App – Manage Your Solution

• In Configure Your Solution, choose item ‘Functions’ under application area – Application Platform and Infrastructure
  

• Click on Configure
  

• Click ‘New Entries’ to add a member function
  

Step 4 – How to view Notifications

• Based on above configurations, when a Situation occurs in Sales Contract, the end user (in this case ‘internal_sales_rep’) receives notifications in Fiori launchpad
  

• On clicking the notification, the end user can navigate to Contract object page where the situation related information is displayed

• The Analytical App ‘Monitor Situations’, is used to monitor the handling of Situations and its occurrences

To conclude, Situation handling is different from workflows. Situations identifies and automatically notifies the users about the issues that went wrong or needs attention and is kind of an operational task, whereas workflows are involved in business processes that requires approval steps without which the business process may not continue.