Situation Handling – Inform, Insight and Decide

Situation Handling – an integrated automation capability of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
SAP Preferred Success has just launched its first Customer Adoption journey for Intelligent Situation Handling (31N). Effective business processes require a high-level of transparency. Transparency in an enterprise system is achieved by combining notifications for early intervention and an intelligent enterprise, which has the capabilities to decode past data with necessary automation. Situation Handling brings urgent and timely information to the attention of the users.
Background on Situation Handling

• It is a technical feature of intelligent ERP and has been available since the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1805 release
• It manages alerts and issues in SAP/S/4HANA Cloud
• It uses notifications to inform specific users of tasks due
• It supports the business in making the right business decisions
• It monitors and adjusts situations in SAP S/4HANA Cloud or with API in external systems
• It enables the automation process

Situation handling brings urgent issues to the attention of specific groups of users who are then able to react immediately to the notifications they receive. This speeds up the handling of specific situations in your company and supports the optimization of your business processes. You can use situation handling to bring important issues to the users’ attention. This helps them focus on specific circumstances and supports the optimization of business processes leveraging the three phases of Intelligent Situation Handling.
The Three Phases of Intelligent Situation Handling

1. Inform user proactively

• Use of proactive info to the dedicated user via SAP S/4HANA notification or email
• Use proposed actions in applications

2. Get insight into business work

• Collect situation related data
• Monitor activities and status
• Track the actions and analyze the situation from alert to solution

3. Use situation data for optimization and automation

• Decide when to use intelligent automation and user expertise
• Use integrated automation to run your use case intelligently

Benefits of Intelligent Situation Handling

• Automatically identify urgent and important issues
  • Customers will be able to use intelligent ERP to improve the quality of their manual business processes
• Bring situations to the right groups of users
  • Fully integrated in Fiori interaction
  • React immediately on notifications
• Intelligent support to make the right decisions
  • Enable your user to take right actions
• Monitor and adjust the situations
  • Optimize the business processes permanently
• Integrate for automation
  • Use the analytical data to improve continuously the intelligent ERP: high quality supported human handling and automation

New Technologies Enable A New Generation of Intelligent Cloud ERP
Situation handling enables your end users to focus on specific circumstances. It leverages:

• Machine learning to reduce mundane tasks and increase business agility
• Intelligent assistants to empower users to focus on what matters
• Predictive analytics to focus more on outcomes than the past

For example, the user gets a heads-up about upcoming deadlines, or are informed about missing supplier confirmations that should be followed-up as soon as possible. Here are several additional use cases in which situation handling provides the greatest business value:

Line of Business	Use Case	Business Value
Sourcing and Procurement	Pending Supplier Confirmation	For customers into 3rd party business, it is crucial to track that their suppliers deliver goods on time.
Sourcing and Procurement Finance	Payment Block and Cash Discount at Risk	The invoicing process is already a highly automated process. Situation Handling considers exceptions which need manual interaction from purchasers or accounts payable experts. Immediate interaction avoids loss of cash discounts.
Research &Development Engineering Finance	(Project) Budget Threshold Exceeded	This leads to increased transparency, reduced manual effort and an acceleration of corrective measures.
Sourcing and Procurement	PR Item Overdue for Confirmation / Confirm Receipt of Goods	Exception handling in employee procurement process to follow up with the employee on the delivery date of its requisition to confirm if the product has been delivered. This avoids the loss of cash discounts and blocked credit lines from suppliers for further orders.
Cross Areas	Deviations in GR/IR	Optimize and speed up of the reconciliation process, when the responsible user gets info proactively about matters that require their attention, who can consequently then react immediately.

As of the SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1905 Release, you can now use situation handling with the following apps:
Finance:

• Reconcile GR/IR Accounts(Fiori ID: F3302; Scope Item: 2V7)

Procurement

• Manage Purchase Contracts(Fiori ID: F1600A; Scope Items: 1QR, BMD)

Cross Applications:

• Data Migration Status(Fiori ID: F3280; Scope Item: BH5)
• Manage Teams and Responsibilities(Fiori ID: F2412; Scope Item: 1NJ)

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

• SAP S/4HANA Cloud release info: http://www.sap.com/s4-cloudrelease
• My 1905 blog on SAP News here
• Press Announcement on SAP News here
• Best practices for SAP S/4HANA Cloud here
• SAP S/4HANA Cloud User Community: register here
• Feature Scope Description here
• What’s New here
• Help Portal Product Pagehere
• Implementation Portal here

Follow us via @SAP and #S4HANA, or myself via @SDenecken


Source: https://blogs.sap.com/2019/07/13/situation-handling-inform-insight-and-decide/