Product Information
Use Situation Handling to Detect Material Coverage Situation in SAP S/4HANA
Introduction
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 not only speeds up the handling of specific situations in your company, but also supports the optimization of your business processes.
There are multiple use cases in business process by leveraging Situation Handling functionality, pleaser refer to the help document for all the use cases.
This blog will show two use cases for material coverage management in S/4HANA Cloud, it is also applicable for S/4HANA OP 1909 edition (please refer to SAP Note 2809017).
– To detect and notify exception situation of purchase requisition cancel process
– To detect and nofify excess stock situation
In both of the use cases, the material or production planner can be informed automatically with contextual information and take actions accordingly.
Blog Applicability
| SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release | 2002 and above |
| SAP S/4HANA On Premise | 1909 and above |
Main Content
Use Case 1: Notification of Purchase Requisition Cancel Exception
Step1: Firm Purchase Requisition to make an exception
In this scenario, forecast (Planned Independent Requirement) was maintained for the material, purchase requisition was generated by MRP run. These MRP element can be found in Monitor Material Coverage app as following.
Then, to produce an exception for purchase requisition cancel process, let’s change the delivery date of PR and make it firmed.
And, we increase the on-hand stock of this material to make more available stock.
Now the firmed PR will not be canceled by MRP run, there should be an exception to be monitored and manually managed.
The following steps will explain how to recognize and send a notification about this exception.
Step2: Manage Teams and Responsibilities
Open Fiori app Manage Teams and Responsibilities (Business Role SAP_BR_BPC_EXPERT – Configuration Expert – Business Process Configuration)
Choose Create Team (+) and enter Name, Status and Type as following:
Define the MRP Controller / MRP Material / MRP Plant in Responsibility Definitions, and Team Members who will receive the material exception notifications.
Step3: Manage Situation Types
Open Fiori app Manage Situation Types, copy the standard template SAP_PP_MRP_MATERIAL_EXCEPTION to create a Situation Type, enter the information in the Admin Information.
Define the Conditions which are filters of exceptions to be handled. For example, Material Situation Type value CAN is for MRP exception Cancel Process (Use Case 1), EXC is for MRP Excess Stock (Use Case 2). We choose both of these filters.
Batch Job can be scheduled at predefined time to send out the notification.
Also other settings can be viewed and defined in Situation Display, Notification Recipients, Situation Monitoring. Please refer to Help document for more details.
Step4: Detect MRP Situations
This step is to detect the MRP exception which was produced in Step 1.
Open Fiori app Detect MRP Situations, schedule a job for your material / MRP Controller / Plant. The Job can be scheduled periodically in Recurrence Pattern. Here we do a single run for demo purpose.
When the job is finished, we can see a record is generated in the Result page of job details. It shows that there is a Cancel Process exception for the material.
Step5: Check and React to Material Exception
In this step, the team member defined in Step 2 will receive a notification about the material exception.
Log on to the SAP Fiori launchpad as the team member, choose the Notifications icon 
on the home page, you will see a notification line ‘Cancel process: PurchReq XXXXX material XXXXX plant XXX.’, choose this line then it will navigate to Manage Material Coverage screen for your further actions.
Use Case 2: Notification of Excess Stock Exception
Step1: Increase supply to make an excess stock exception
We use Make to Order scenario as an example, planned order was generated by MRP run following the sales order requirement, and we converted it to production order. To produce the excess stock exception, we increased the production order quantity to make it larger than the sales order.
These MRP element can be found in Monitor Material Coverage app as following.
Step2 & Step3
Same with Use Case 1.
Step4: Detect MRP Situations
Also similar with Use Case 1, we schedule the Detect MRP Situations job to detect the exception produced in Step1.
We can see the following record generated to explain the excess stock situation, with detail information of material, plant, MRP element etc.
Step5: Check and React to Material Exception
Same with Use Case 1.
Conclusion
In summary, production planners can make use of the Situation Handling to proactively monitor the material coverage situations relates to MRP elements, to take actions in time. Hopefully this is helpful.
You can also refer to more information in the following links:
Help Portal – Situation Template: MRP Material Exceptions:
S/4HANA Cloud Best Practice Scope Item J44 – Material Requirements Planning:
S/4HANA On Premise 1909 Best Practice Scope Item J44 – Material Requirements Planning:
SAP Note – MRP Material Situations Handling
https://launchpad.support.sap.com/#/notes/2809017
Thank you for sharing this information Liz. It can certainly improve the daily struggles of a production planner or purchaser!
Nice blog ! we are bringing a real differentiation in the way to do business with the situation handling and your blog nicely explains how it can be done.
Great explanation on how to setup this solution. Hopefully, my clients will be delighted.
Thanks for sharing!