What’s New in SAP Business ByDesign February 2016: Access Restriction in Customer Demand

[Former Member]

In this blog we'd like to introduce you to some of the things that are new in the February 2016 version of SAP Business ByDesign.

Of course, you can find more information in the What's New in SAP Business ByDesign documentation, which is available online or as a pdf.

Today, we're going to talk about Access Restriction in Customer Demand.

As an administrator, you give access rights to a user at the level of work centers views. Access to data in assigned work center views can be restricted using various attributes called access contexts. Customer demands get created in the systems from sales orders, service orders, stock transfer order, and project stock orders. Each sales order has a corresponding customer demand that can include items that are fulfilled from different sources of supply. If you have multiple companies or sites maintained in your system, you can control which customer demands a user can access in the Customer Demand view in Outbound Logistics Control and Supply Planning work centers.

You can now restrict access to customer demands with the hierarchal access context 1021 – Company and Site where you can restrict a user at both company and site level. Depending on the access rights and restrictions you have defined, a user can view and edit selected customer demands.

If you maintain access context at company level, then the users can access demands from all sites within the company. If you maintain access context at site level, then users can only access demands for the sites that they are authorized for. In such a case, the users cannot access demands which do not have source of supply and the demands that are fulfilled by supplier (TPOP).

Users can release all items if you have maintained access restriction at company level. If you have maintained restrictions at site level, then users can release only the items for the site that they have authorization for.

Please note that with the availability of the new access context, all the previous restrictions maintained for Customer Demand view will be changed to unrestricted access for this new access context. The administrator will have to maintain the access restriction again for users for whom it is required.

Limitations:

For one sales order only one instance of customer demand is created even if the items of the sales order are fulfilled from different source of supply. Thus, a customer demand can have a mix of items with source of supply as site, supplier or with no source of supply.

However, as the access restriction works for the whole instance and not the individual line items, there are scenarios in which there is some difference between expected and actual behavior.

In all the scenarios any user who has authorization for one of the site which belongs to any of the item of the customer demand, will have access to the whole instance.

For more information, see Access Rights and Restriction in Customer Demand.

Are you familiar with the What's New video in SAP Business ByDesign? You can have a look at it here.