Want to take advantage of intelligent automation in SAP S/4HANA?
Situation handling is a quick win feature to get your intelligent automation journey started.
Working with the SAP S/4HANA RIG, one of the common questions we get from multiple customers nowadays is:
I’m now on S/4HANA and I want to start using the intelligent features in the product. Where do I start?
There are multiple answers to this question, like deploying bots with iRPA (Intelligent Robotic Process Automation) or CAI (Conversational AI), de-coupling your custom objects by doing side-by-side extensions with SAP BTP ABAP Environment or activating the Predictive Analysis and Machine Learning algorithms already available in your SAP S/4HANA system via the Intelligent Scenarios and Intelligent Scenario Management apps.
All these options and many others are possible and would greatly benefit your business. However, some of these scenarios may require additional investments not only from an economic, time and effort perspective but also on your teams’ skills making this a mid-term plan depending on your current situation.
But don’t be disappointed, this is not the end of the road. It is the beginning, and a good start if you want to go through this journey is thinking on leveraging SAP Fiori along with SAP Situation Handing.
Let us first try to define Situation Handing. In my own words (with a technical perspective):
Situation Handling is an engine included in your SAP S/4HANA system that acts as a listener for specific scenarios and data input combinations to then generate a notification for an end-user to execute an action or follow-up on a business process.
As simple as it sounds is as good as it gets because the main scenarios available focus on helping your business solve issues related to the most common day-to-day activities, like notifying your business users about:
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- Upcoming deadlines or events
- Delays
- Pending tasks
You can find the available scenarios for Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA in the following links:
And you will also find a better description of Situation Handling plus how you can apply the concepts behind Situation Handling to empower your end-users in the following blog series:
- Situation Handling: What is it and why do you need it? (1/5)
- SAP Fiori 3: How to put intelligence into your user experience
If you’ve reached this section in this blog, then you might be thinking: These are nice definitions, but how do I get started?
To make it easier for you to run the technical activities to setup this engine, we have prepared the following step-by-step guide: Basic technical configurations for SAP Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA.
In this guide you will find the main steps for setting up Situation Handling, including:
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- Activating OData V4 services
- Activating SAP Fiori Apps for Situation Handling (with Rapid Activation)
- Activating and configuring Notification Providers
Following the steps in this guide will help you setup your main architecture, like in the image below:
With the technical settings done you are now ready to roll, and your functional team needs to setup the situation handling templates according to your business needs, you can find examples on how to setup situations in the following blogs and videos:
- Situation Handling: Use Case – Confirmation is Overdue for PR Item
- Situation Handling: Use Case – Invoice skipped in Payment Advice
- Situation Handling: Use Case – MRP (WIP)
- Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery
- Catalog Item Proposal Is Ready to Use
- Low Number of Quotations Received
- Invoice Skipped in Payment Advice
- Errors and Warnings in Allocation Runs
- GR/IR Processor was Changed
- Stock Transport Order Overdue
Situation Handling is a quick-win solution embedded in your SAP S/4HANA system that can help you jumpstart your journey to the intelligent enterprise with minimum efforts and big impacts so give it a try and let us know your questions and experiences in the comments section.
I’d like to thank Betty Guedez, Jose Marquez Mares and Kusiel Camargo for their support in creating this content.
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This content was brought to you by the SAP S/4HANA RIG team
