Pre-built Workflow Content to Handle Sales Order Approvals and Credit Block in SAP S/4HANA

SAP Workflow Management enables the digitalization of workflows, decision management, and visibility on end-to-end business processes (SAP & non-SAP). It empowers business experts to configure new process variations in an LCNC (low-code/no-code) approach and provides business users with SAP Fiori-based user interfaces.

With SAP Workflow Management, our customer gets access to multiple pre-built process content templates/samples across applications. A workflow content package can include re-usable workflow models, decision logic, dashboards to monitor the process, user interfaces, and integration flows to connect with the backend system. This enables our customers to import such templates, change them as per their requirements, and run the process in a limited time.

Sales Orders in SAP S/4HANA and SAP S/4HANA Cloud

The sales function is at the heart and soul of any business. SAP S/4HANA covers the needed sales and distribution lifecycle, from pre-sales activities, sales order processing to shipping and billing. Once the user creates a sales order, it is sent for approval based on the configuration. The process can be configured for internal approval (via Flexible Workflows) or external approvals. When you process a sales order, the system can automatically carry out essential functions, such as the pricing, availability check, credit limit check, etc. A credit limit check failure is an exception in the process, and the order is blocked for further processing until the block is removed.

Workflow Packages for Sales Order in SAP S/4HANA

SAP Workflow Management now has two new workflow templates to manage external approvals and handling credit limit check failure for the sales order (standard order) in SAP S/4HANA (on-premise and cloud).

Key features of the workflow packages for Sales Order

• Pre-built integration flows (together with SAP Event Mesh) enables event-driven architecture. What it means:
  • When a sales order is created in SAP S/4HANA and is configured for external approval, then it automatically creates a workflow with SAP Workflow Management (also based on approval reason code).
  • When a sales order is approved (auto-approved or flexible workflows or external workflows) but is blocked for credit, then a workflow is automatically triggered with SAP Workflow Management notifying the credit controllers. From the workflow, they could also release credit for a specific sales order.
• It also provides plug-and-play with SAP S/4HANA without any additional development for the standard order.

• Both packages provide flexibility in determining approvers – You can determine the approvers either from SAP S/4HANA (or other external applications) or configure business rules in SAP BTP.

Configure rule-based or external approvers

Rule-based approver determination

• Automatic email notification to approvers or credit managers (in case of credit check failure).
• Option of enabling additional validation on sales orders before performing the approvals or release credit block.
• With re-usable process steps or workflows (Approve Sales Order, Update Sales Order, etc.), users can easily create new process variants in a low-code/no-code approach based on different attributes of the sales order. For example, you could have a two-step approval process for all orders above USD 10,000 one-step approval for order below 10,000 USD and an auto-approval process for orders below USD 500, provided that the additional validations are successful.

Two-step Variant for Sales Order Approval

Auto Approval Variant for Low-Value Sales Orders

• Users can enable step conditions based on one or more sales order attributes. For example, you could allow additional approval steps for a specific sales organization or sold-to-party, and order value is greater than USD 100,000.

Variant for Credit Release package with Step Conditions based on Sales Order Attributes

• Approval tasks are available in the “My Inbox” application in SAP BTP with pre-built user interfaces.

Approval tasks in My Inbox application

• Out-of-the-box visibility into key process performance indicators like open sales orders, approval cycle time, number of credit blocked sales orders, etc. Our customer can configure the dashboard to add additional performance indicators or change the visualization (for example, from pie chart to column chart).

Dashboard to monitor the Sales Order Approvals and Credit Block

Note: The Manage Credit Block on Sales Order package neither replaces nor have all the features of SAP Credit Management or Financial Supply Chain Management. It enables an approval process with information about the credit blocked sales order. Our customers could use this package for exception management, notifications, auditing or even release credit for the particular sales order after approval from one or more personas like credit manager, finance analysts, etc.

How to get the workflow templates

Both the sales order workflow packages come as part of SAP Workflow Management. In addition, high-level information about the content is available in SAP API Business Hub (Manage Sales Orders and Manage Credit Block on Sales Order), where you can view process steps & templates along with the setup guide, configuration guide, and user guides. If you want to consume the process content package, you need a subscription/CPEA license to SAP Workflow Management. They are also available in the trial landscape.

Setup your SAP BTP Tenant

Before importing the packages, you need to setup your SAP BTP tenant. Follow the setup guide of the respective packages for any pre-requisites (required services, roles, setting up destinations in SAP BTP tenant, etc.).

Import packages to your SAP BTP tenant

Once you have a subscription/CPEA license to SAP Workflow Management (or using the SAP BTP trial), you will be able to search and import the content packages into your SAP BTP tenant using the Process Flexibility Cockpit app. You can choose to have either of the two packages or import both of them, based on your requirement.

Import Manage Sales Order package

Import Package to Handle Credit Check Failure

When you import the workflow package, it will automatically import the respective workflows or process steps, business rules, user interface required for the approval task, process visibility dashboard.

Configure packages

Once the developer imports the workflow package (consists of process steps/workflows, decisions, dashboard, and user interfaces) into your SAP BTP tenant, follow the configuration guides of the respective packages to set up new variants, configure decisions, and process visibility dashboard.

Setup integration between SAP S/4HANA and SAP Workflow Management

To automatically create an approval workflow for Sales Order or to start an approval process to release a sales order credit block in SAP BTP, you need to setup SAP Event Mesh together with SAP Cloud Integration iflows.

In your integration tenant, discover and import “SAP S/4HANA Integration with SAP Workflow Management Sales Order”. It contains three integration flows for the three lifecycle events of a Sales Order – Create, Change and Delete. Configure the integration flows and deploy them. Setup SAP Event Mesh to receive the events from SAP S/4HANA (on-premise or cloud), and for the Sales Order events to call the respective iflows. The following business events are required for the Sales Order packages:

1. /sap/s4/beh/salesorder/v1/SalesOrder/Created/v1
2. /sap/s4/beh/salesorder/v1/SalesOrder/Changed/v1
3. /sap/s4/beh/salesorder/v1/SalesOrder/Deleted/v1

The set-up guide and integration guide in the package explains in detail about the steps required.

Event-driven architecture for Sales Order packages

Key takeaways

With the Manage Sales Orders package sample template our customers can easily configure external approvals for Standard Order in SAP S/4HANA (on-premise and cloud). It provides flexibility in configuring different variation of the approval process based on the order attributes.

With Manage Credit Block on Sales Order package, our customers can configure to automatically start an approval process to manage the credit block on a particular sales order. The credit managers also get an email notification for each sales order which is blocked for credit.

Both scenarios can be easily integrated with the pre-built integration, to enable an event-driven architecture in handling standard orders in SAP S/4HANA.

The content packages are already available on SAP API Business Hub along with many other contents for different lines of businesses and the list is growing day-by-day. They can be enhanced further by our customers to meet the business requirements.