Professional Services in SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208

Welcome back to the 2208 release. Let me guide you through the main new functionalities for the Professional Services area in SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Please take a look at my video for a short overview:

Approval workflow for project billing requests.

There are multiple scenarios we enable with adding the new project billing request for the central approval framework, the approval workflow based on different contract types and item usages including “on accounts” and “down payments”​, approval workflow for “to be billed” or “to be written off” items​, and the approval workflow for items that were postponed to the next billing cycle​.

The approval workflow can be defined in a way that allows sending the approval to one or multiple business users. If possible, the subsequent billing document request is created automatically in order to speed up the end-to-end billing process. ​This and automatic rejection can be defined by an administrator.

This functionality will help ensure accuracy of bill preparation through the approval process for project billing requests​.

Handling of multiple addresses in professional services using data from SAP business partners

This first item will be extremely helpful for our customers in maintaining their master data. It will reduce time and cost, and will increase professional services process efficiency through use of only one central master data record for a complete legal entity.

Starting with 2208 you will be able change the previously maintained addresses for each partner function of type Customer (KU), except for partner functions sold-to-party and payer in the billing item or sales order.

The system first proposes suitable addresses from master data for the ship-to and bill-to party after the system has determined the sold-to party. Now you can leverage a drop-down list of each address field to select alternative valid addresses.

Improvements to the Timesheet

There have been several smaller improvemennts to the SAP S/4HANA Timesheet that will help users with their time postings.

One is the new email reminders to project managers to approve pending time sheets. You can now notify project managers, or any user established as an approver, of pending time entries awaiting approval in their inboxes, so schedule e-mail notification and specify the conditions or criteria for sending the e-mail (for instance, upon a certain threshold).

Also the new In-app notifications in the “Manage my timesheet” app for rejected time entries. You can notify employees when their time entries have been rejected by their managers. In CE2202, email notifications was introduced. In addition to the e-mail notification, with CE2208 , Employees can also leverage the Manage my Timesheet app to:​

• View the list of rejected time entries in the Alerts section​
• Navigate from the list directly to the corresponding week to correct the rejected time recordings

And there are some usability improvements as well. For example:​

• Additional information to show monthly staffed and recorded hours in the task Worklist for customer/Internal Projects​
• Possibility to control the visibility of the UI controls in the application via the Adapt UI option.​
• Support Warning messages in the extension BADI for Validation.

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Usability Enhancements in the Project Management functionality

Also in the projects itself our developers worked on improving the handling and process flow.

The first item I would like to highlight, is the Mass Recalculation of Customer and Internal Projects. With this customers will be able to perform mass recalculations of project costs and revenues on change in the prices of activity types or consultants, as well as schedule the background process for mass recalculation with different selection criteria.

Next is the new determination/ validation Badi for workpackages of customer and internal projects. Previously there was no determination/ validation Badi for work packages of customer/internal projects in place, so users could not define customer logics for work packages of customer/internal projects. Now users have the possibility to influence the determination/validation logics for work package of customer/internal projects.

Also there was more flexibility added to the configuration of work packages. Previously the configuration of work items could only be maintained in Q system, and will be automatically transported to P system. This will lead to some test data in P system, which is confusing to end users. In this release we enable the ‘Redo in P system’ for the work item configuration.

And last but not least, there is now the possibility to link and unlink professional service projects and solution orders. With the 2208 release, the existing professional service (i.e., category 7) project in planning stage can be linked and unlinked to solution order item. Prior to 2208, the solution order item had the capability to only create a new project.

Changing of Assignment Status “Soft-Booked/Hard-Booked.”

SAP S/4HANA Cloud for projects, resource management allows Resource Mangers to execute soft-booked assignments as well as hard-booked assignments of resources. With the assignment status Resource Managers can tentatively reserve a resources’ capacity, for example for a project, that is not yet confirmed. The assignment is confirmed, once it is hard-booked. In the “Manage Resource Utilization” app, when editing assignments, Resource Managers can now immediately change the assignment status of soft-booked assignments to hard-booked to confirm the initial assignment. This can be necessary, for example, if the availability of a resource changes or if project requirements change.

This flexibility will help with improving the utilization of your resources and delivers an immediate reflection of changes based on resource availability and project requirements.

For more information on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, check out the following links:

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info here
• Sven Denecken’s SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 Release Blog
• The Link Collection for Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management here
• Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management Community
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud 2208 Early Release Series Webinars here
• Latest SAP S/4HANA Cloud Release Blogs here
• Product videos on our SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA YouTube playlist
• Inside SAP S/4HANA Podcast here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud Community: here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Page here

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