Intelligent Situation Automation – an extension of SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling

What is Intelligent Situation Automation? 

SAP S/4HANA Intelligent Situation Handling increases the quality and the efficiency of your business process by signaling exceptional circumstances and providing heads-up information. Users no longer need to recall important deadlines and manually check statuses of, for instance, expiring contracts, pending approvals, material exceptions, nearly consumed budgets, and more. It informs users pro-actively about issues requiring their attention. Situations are indicated in apps and can be notified on SAP Fiori launchpad in urgent and important cases. Detailed pages describe the situation, provide related information, and can offer solution proposals. For more details on SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling you may refer to this blog post.

Intelligent Situation Automation (ISA ) is an extension of the SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling on the SAP Cloud Platform that lets you analyze the situation data and configure rules for automation. If such a rule applies, situations are no longer displayed to the users responsible but are processed directly by the Situation Handling engine which further speeds up processes.

The graphic below shows how the data from SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling is collected into a data store, which is used for analyzing the situations data. Also, rules can be built to automate the resolution of the data. The green boxes are all built on SCP and are now available for customer beta testing. The general availability of the solution is not yet determined.

The blog further describes the solution with the use case the value this automation could bring to your business.

Solution Overview of Intelligent Situation Automation

Use Case: Physical Inventory Counting 

A business that deals with goods and materials for sale, needs to take stock of their materials from time to time to tally its inventory system records with what is in stock. For this, a warehouse clerk creates a physical inventory document and enters the physical count of items of each material. If there’s a difference between the physical count and the system count, it is reported to the Inventory Manager. An inventory manager either approves the difference and posts the document or requests a recount of the items. This depends on the cost of the material and the tolerance limit for difference in SAP S/4HANA Situation Handling. The Inventory Manager is notified when there is a document ready to be reviewed. Then the Manager should manually post or trigger a recount for the document.

This typically takes 2-3 minutes per document. This means it’s a time-consuming process, especially considering that there will be multiple physical inventory documents for each counting cycle. The snapshot below depicts the process and the points where a situation is raised.

Physical Inventory Counting Process

With Intelligent Situation Automation, this manual effort by the Inventory manager can be reduced significantly by posting the document automatically or triggering a recount. This can be done by creating rules in the Manage Situation Automation app to specify under which business conditions (either material or cost based) the posting can be automated. The snapshot below shows a sample rule created to automate the resolution.

Sample Automation Rule

The Inventory manager can also use the Situation Dashboard to see the volume of situations generated over the last 6 months, observe patterns and understand how the situations were resolved. They can also see how much time was saved due to automation. See the snapshot of the Intelligent Situations dashboard below.

Intelligent Situation Automation Dashboard

Call for Action: 

What is described in this blog post is just one usecase of what is possible with Intelligent Situation Automation. It has the capability to automate more Situation Handling use cases. Please reach out to us, to participate in beta testing.

Best Regards,
Deepika Reddy

Product Owner, Intelligent Situation Automation