Account group-based field property control in S/4HANA Masterdata FIORI Apps

Business Context

Account group is an important attribute, which is used to classify Customer or Vendor Masterdata records for various standard functions. It is part of header data in customer/vendor master and is widely used in SAP ERP systems ECC as well as S/4HANA. Besides influencing quite some aspects like Business Partner Number range, One-time accounts, Partner Functions etc., a key function of the account group attribute is to control UI Field properties at entity level datasets (General data, Company code, Sales/Purchasing). Below sections elaborates how this feature is enabled in the S/4HANA Masterdata FIORI Applications.

Motivation

SAP recommends all S/4HANA customers and partners to adopt FIORI for UI Applications. In accordance with SAP ERP Masterdata transactions, business end-users have fair expectation from Customer and Supplier (FIORI) Applications, that the UI Field properties (such as mandatory, read-only etc.) should be configurable based on Account Group attribute.

Solution

To address the above, this feature has been implemented in FIORI Apps – Manage Customer Master, Manage Supplier Master and partly Manage BP (via object navigations for standard Customer and Vendor/Supplier roles), and will be released to customers with S/4HANA 2011CE. Additionally the account group based field control customizing has also been opened up as Self-Service Configuration User Interface (SSCUI), for S/4HANA Cloud customers to configure as per business needs.

Essential implementation steps include exposing traditional Account Group IMG Customizing – ‘Define Account Groups with Screen Layout’ (Customers, Vendors) into Cloud as a WebGUI SSCUI; and enabling the FIORI application to read this customizing and render the UI field properties accordingly. Applications in S/4HANA work on the Business Partner paradigm, and the given feature is primarily applicable for standard roles for Customers and Suppliers namely FLCU01, FLCU00, FLVN01, FLVN00.

Steps

Following are the steps for an S/4HANA Cloud end-user, to maintain the field property configurations at customer/vendor entity levels, which then reflects in the FIORI UI for Masterdata maintenance.

1. Go to app – Configure your solution for list of SSCUIs, Filter on Application area as Database and Data Management, Sub Application Area as Business Partner. Navigate to SSCUI Ids – 103050(Customer) and 103127 (Vendor) as highlighted below.

Note: These correspond to the same IMG Customizing – Define Account Groups with Screen Layout (Customers/Vendors) accessible via SPRO transaction for on-premise users.

2. Proceeding with example for Customers (same screen flow for corresponding vendor customizing), navigate into SSCUI – Define Account Groups with Screen Layout (Customers). In landing screen, user needs to select an Account group, double-click on it to drill-down to the next screen.

3. In the second screen, user needs to select the entity/dataset for which he or she wants to control the field properties. For instance, for customer account group ZCUS, user wants to control Sales Area related fields for (sales) customers, and hence double-clicks on entity – Sales Data. Next, the user needs to select the intended group of fields.

4. After selecting the desired field set, user arrives at the screen where he or she can set field UI properties viz. – Suppress (Hidden), Req. Entry (Mandatory), Opt. Entry (Optional) and Display (Read only). User needs to maintain and save these field properties configuration as per business needs.

5. Subsequently, user launches the corresponding FIORI Application, in this case – Manage Customer Master. User would enter Role – FLCU01 for maintaining customer sales data and navigate to Sales Area object page to observe the Field properties reflecting in the FIORI UI (figure below), as per the configurations maintained in the previous step.

User needs to note that certain fields in the customizing content may corresponding to one or more fields on the FIORI UI, which may have a different names/labels. The below product documentation covers various aspects of Field status control, including a detailed list where customizing field names are mapped against the corresponding FIORI UI field names.

Documentation for Defining Field Status for Customers – https://help.sap.com/viewer/f86dc2eb1f8b48c880a7607213104b27/LATEST/en-US/fac15741246d4db882e2d58fd64da036.html

Documentation for Defining Field Status for Vendors – https://help.sap.com/viewer/f86dc2eb1f8b48c880a7607213104b27/LATEST/en-US/a54c00bdae474bc78314bc1752e2dd2e.html

Further documentation links such as SAP Help portal and What’s New (S/4HANA 2011CE) can be referred to, for more details.

Current Scope and Considerations

· Scope of fields handled for this functionality is confined to the ones that currently exist on the standard FIORI app UI (Manage Customer Master and Manage Supplier Master). Not all the fields in the Account group customizing content, are part of the current version of FIORI Apps.

· End users must validate the presence of a given field on the standard UI of the apps, before setting it as ‘Req. Entry’ (mandatory) in the IMG/SSCUI, to avoid backend errors in the FIORI application which can’t be fixed from UI. Conversely, users should refrain from making those field as ‘Req. Entry’ (mandatory) in customizing, which are outside standard UI scope of the mentioned FIORI apps.

· In context of this feature and its design, users are recommended to maintain a given Customer/Vendor object entirely from the Fiori app. The UI field properties in BP Transaction (or Maintain BP app), may vary in certain cases due to consideration of additional customizing based on BP Roles, Activity, Clients etc., which are currently outside FIORI scope.

Summary

In conclusion, with this development, SAP advances towards enriched S/4HANA Masterdata FIORI applications to deliver a modern, yet simplified user experience, alongside the robust features of SAP ERP. It provides flexibility to business-users (particularly in Cloud) to configure masterdata maintenance screens as per their needs (For e.g., making an important field as mandatory, or hiding a field that’s not required). This also eventually bridges gap for ERP/ECC customers, who have widely used traditional Account Group Customizing for Customer/Vendor transactions and aims to have positive impact S/4HANA FIORI adoption by customers & partners.