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SAP S/4HANA – the new Situation Handling functionality

Tamas Szirtes |

Imagine if your ERP was more intelligent and enabled you to achieve business value and improve productivity. With an intelligent ERP, being able to automate repetitive and standard business processes frees up your users to focus on higher-value tasks, only paying attention to issues that arise by exception. And with automation and intelligence built into your ERP, your staff can also access standard data and analytics directly in a self-service manner without having to submit requests for specific reports to a third party.

The concept of management by exception is growing with automation capability and never more so than in SAP S/4HANA and the latest digital user experience Fiori 3.

New functionality to improve productivity

Now SAP S/4HANA is improving productivity even more with its new Situation Handling functionality. Situation handling is a technique that notifies users of exceptional business issues that need attention, and then helps the user to resolve the situation with all the relevant information together with proposed solutions. It’s now a standard part of the SAP S/4HANA and Fiori 3 technology so you don’t have to buy it as an add-on. It includes pre-configured or learned situations and you can also modify or create your own situations.

Using pre-defined thresholds, users are notified of pending issues and provided with contextual information about a given situation together with proposed actions and recommendations. For example, if a supplier’s delivery made to your warehouse was not complete, certain actions could be suggested such as an alternative supplier that could fulfil your requirement. Notifications can be received via Fiori interface, via email or native apps to your mobile device. Other examples of notifications may include things like:

  • An invoice that is blocked for payment will soon be overdue. Risk of late payment fee.
  • You have used 80% of your digital access entitlement. Please renew the license if you want to continue using this service.

For current ECC users, the management by exception with pro-active notifications will be a big change. With ECC, if you have a sales quotation that is close to expiry for example, you will not receive any notification of this. With SAP S/4HANA’s new Situation Handling functionality, you would be given a heads-up of the pending expiry and given options to act upon.

SAP S/4HANA gives you an Intelligent ERP and includes Fiori 3, a key part of which is machine intelligence. With the new Situation Handling functionality, you will be able to run your business smarter and turn your users into intelligence enterprise users.

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