Situation Handling: What Is It and Why do You Need It? (1/5)

Situation Handling supports you in effectively handling all kinds of issues in your business, in both SAP S/4HANA Cloud and SAP S/4HANA.

This is the first of five blog posts on Situation Handling, with the follow-on posts taking you gradually deeper into the topic.

What is Situation Handling?

Situation Handling is a framework that automatically detects, tracks, and informs about issues in your business that require the attention of specified users. You can choose from various options to inform your users about such situations in your business such as notifications, list views, or dedicated object pages. Also, you can provide your users with data related to these situations for informed decisions, and proposed actions to solve the situations as quickly and efficiently as possible.

You can define your own use cases by choosing from a wide range of standard situation templates from various business areas, complete with text proposals by which end users are informed about the situations. You can adapt them easily to fit your requirements.

Situation Handling allows you to track and collect comprehensive analytical data on business situations and how they are handled, which helps you monitor and continuously improve your own business processes as part of an Intelligent ERP. Check out this little video which gives you a good overview of how Situation Handling works.

What are the benefits of Situation Handling?

With Situation Handling, you can

• Gain efficiency and safety through the automatic detection of urgent or important issues
• Speed up issue handling by automatically informing the right users
• Enable your users to act immediately
• Provide intelligent support which helps your users make the right decisions
• Monitor the handling and life cycle of situations
• Collect data for further processing and automation
• Improve your business processes

What kinds of situations can be handled?

You can, for example, create situations for

• Upcoming events or deadlines
• Exceeded thresholds, such as consumption rates and business relevant KPIs
• Delays
• Expiring contracts or new contracts
• Deviating demands or turnover rates
• Pending tasks, such as approvals and confirmations

How does Situation Handling work?

This is how it works:

1. Your business configuration expert selects a situation template that is relevant for your business. Based on this template, they define a situation type and the conditions that trigger a situation instance for the concerned business object, according to the use case.
2. When the business object data is changed, an event signals this change to Situation Handling and the data is evaluated, using a query and the defined filters.
3. When data does not change, but time dependency is important, a batch job triggers the re-evaluation of the situation type, using a query and filters.
4. Based on whether the defined conditions are met, a situation instance is created.
5. The users who are to take care of the situation are determined by the integrated Responsibility Management.
6. The users responsible are notified, for example, by a notification in SAP Fiori launchpad and by email. The situation instance is also displayed in the My Situations app.
7. Plus, the situation instance is displayed in the app that uses Situation Handling; this is also where the users responsible navigate to from the notifications they have received.
8. Depending on the use case, the users can now see in the app all related information and proposed actions for solving the situation.
9. The user selects an action and resolves the situation. As an alternative, the user can close a situation without a proposed action and provide feedback by setting the right status: Resolved, obsolete, or invalid.

If monitoring is enabled for a situation type, all situation data is tracked for analysis and automation purposes (this will be detailed in a later post. Stay tuned!).

Interested in learning more?

Now you have an overview of how Situation Handling works! If you want to find out more, check out our next blog posts:

• Situation Handling: Selected use cases in different application areas (2/5)
• Situation Handling: How do I configure situation types? (3/5)
• Situation Handling: How to analyze situations using Monitor Situations (4/5)
• Situation Handling: Advanced configuration of situation types (5/5)

For more information, see SAP Help Portal for Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA Cloud and Situation Handling in SAP S/4HANA. We welcome your valuable feedback.

The article originally appeared on SAP Community.