This blogpost summarizes about a new accelerator content “Business Partner Creation Approval Process” which enables to automate the approval and creation of business partner for SAP S/4HANA, in a flexible and transparent way. A business partner is the leading object and single point of entry to maintain Business Partner, Customer, and Supplier/Vendors master data.
This content package leverages the SAP Workflow Management capabilities which includes digitizing workflows, automating business decisions and polices, central access to tasks in My Inbox, end to end visibility into the process, and also includes the flexibility in executing a specific variant of the process depending on attributes like business partner category.
Some of the Key Capabilities of this content package are listed below:
- Plug and play with SAP S/4HANA without any additional development
- Possible to create business partner of category types Person and Organization
- Process steps delivered for enrichment and creation of business partner
- Process Flexibility to create variants using the pre-delivered process steps in a no-code/low-code approach
- Business Rules to determine process variants, approvers and to set default values
- Automatic email notification to the involved parties
- Prebuilt UI5 content for process start and tasks user interfaces
- Insight to actions using Process Visibility
- Out-of-the-box visibility into key process performance indicators
Configuring and using the Process Content
The process content can be discovered, imported, and configured via the Process Flexibility Cockpit; a no-code tool meant for business experts. This cockpit also provides a view on all the imported process content packages from SAP API Business Hub.
Process Flexibility Cockpit
Process Flexibility Cockpit enables a business process expert to access the process content artifacts and make required changes to suit the business requirements. It includes:
- Process Variants
- Decisions and policies
- Visibility Scenario and Live Process Insights dashboard
Figure 1: Process Flexibility Cockpit
Manage Process Variants
The process expert can create a process variant based on the business needs using the Process Variant Editor.
Figure 2: Process Variant
Manage Decisions
The business process expert can modify the decisions and polices based on the business needs using the Manage Decision application.
Figure 3: Manage Decisions
Live Process Insights
The business process expert can gain end-to-end visibility on processes using the preconfigured visibility scenario. It provides actionable insights on running processes and identifying bottlenecks.
Figure 4: Visibility Scenario
Use Case:
The process flow starts with an initial request submission to create a business partner with preliminary details. This in turn triggers the configured process variant determined by the SAP Business Rule service, which includes the steps for data enrichment where more information can be shared for the address data and likewise the finance data respectively. Once the enrichment steps are through, the request is sent to the approvers determined by the configured SAP Business Rule service. This is where the approvals can go back and forth if any rework is needed at any given enrichment step. Finally post the approval step, the process ends with the successful business partner creation in the destined backend SAP S/4HANA system. The content package comes with pre-built UI5 applications to fulfil the aforementioned process flow.
Below are the major steps listed as part of this process content.
Submit Business Partner Creation Request:
When a user submits a request to create a new business partner, a pre-configured process variant is triggered in SAP Workflow Management based on configurable business conditions. On approval, a business partner is created in SAP S/4HANA system.
The application to submit a request to onboard or create a new business partner, can be accessed from the application tile in SAP Central Fiori Launchpad.
Figure 5: Create Business Partner Application
The application requires following data to be entered like Requester Information, Basic Data, and the Roles, before the request is sent for next steps of data enrichment, followed by approval.
Figure 6: Submit Business Partner Creation Approval Request
Enrich Address and Finance Data:
Once the request is submitted, the request further needs to be enriched with more details, hence, tasks are created and assigned to determined owners, to enrich the address and finance data respectively.
Figure 7: Address Enrichment
Figure 8: Finance Data Enrichment
Request Approval:
Post the data enrichment, the request goes for approval. During the approval, there is also an option to request for rework for any step of enrichment. Before completing the approval task, user can send the request back for rework. The rework type can be complete rework where the process starts from the first step, or partial rework where the rework can be requested for any given step like address enrichment or finance data enrichment.
Figure 9: Approval Request Task with Rework options
After all the data enrichment and approval tasks are accomplished, a service call is made to create the business partner in the backend SAP S/4HANA system.
Review Business Partner Data:
Once the business partner is successfully created, a new task is created to review the details of the created business partner, which then completes the process flow.
Figure 10: Review Business Partner
Summary:
This concludes the blogpost which essentially showcased how using the capabilities of SAP Workflow Management, a business partner can be created for SAP S/4HANA with required enrichment and approval steps in a flexible way, allowing complete transparency throughout the process flow.
The content package is already available on SAP API Business Hub along with many other interesting contents for different lines of businesses and the list is ever-growing. The sources can be cloned from SAP Sample GitHub, and can be enhanced further to meet the business requirements.
