As a procurement professional, have you ever faced the challenges of lacking visibility into the fulfillment status of your purchase orders or receiving late updates on short shipments from  suppliers? As a material planner, have you ever faced a shortage of inventory causing disruptions and bottlenecks in the MRP and production processes?  

Time and again, these issues are discovered too late, disrupting downstream operations in material planning, production, and customer order fulfillment. What if there were a way to receive automatic and timely notifications, enabling prompt corrective actions?  

Introducing Situation Handling 

Situation Handling is a ready-to-use function in SAP S/4HANA that automatically checks for inefficiencies and bottlenecks and can proactively alert users via SAP Fiori notifications. In this blog, we’ll focus specifically on how leveraging Situation Handling use cases for Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery may alleviate pain points in your procurement processes: 

1. Automatic Check for Pending Supplier Confirmation 

Traditionally, purchasers manually run the Monitor Supplier Confirmation app periodically to check on the confirmation status. It’s easy to overlook this task while juggling other business critical tasks and expect on-time and in-full deliveries from historically reliable suppliers. However, we’ve all witnessed the disruptions and unpredictability of the supply chain in recent years. There’s significant risk to such anomalies not captured in time and it’s more critical now than ever to put in place automated monitoring capabilities. 

With Situation Handling for Pending Supplier Confirmation, SAP can automatically check for any purchase document pending supplier confirmations within the monitoring period (part of the standard Sourcing and Procurement configuration). The results align with those of the Monitor Supplier Confirmation report so that if a confirmation has not been received or if the confirmation was received but not in full, that is, a pending quantity exists, then a situation instance is raised. 

 Figure 1: Two situation instances for Pending Supplier Confirmation were raised.

Figure 2: Monitor Supplier Confirmation app displaying the purchase orders corresponding to the situation instances. 

2. Automatic Check for Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery   

Much like the Situation Handling use case for Pending Supplier Confirmation, Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery also checks for purchase order items:  

• With missing supplier confirmations within the monitoring period  
• With received supplier confirmations but not in full 

Figure 3: Two situation instances for Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery were raised.

The key difference between the two use cases, as explained by the product owners, is that Pending Supplier Confirmation is designed to be a collection of items that are pending confirmation and by default provides a summary of how many confirmations are pending. On the other hand, Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery provides a more detailed focus regarding quantity and item level information. Therefore, if the business need is to have a high-level catch all, then Pending Supplier Confirmation may be the use case you want to set up. On the other hand, if the business need is to monitor a specific scenario, such as a strategy material group, then Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery may be the right use case. In both use cases, however, it is possible to navigate to the detailed information by clicking on the notification or the situation instances, which navigates to Monitor Supplier Confirmations app and Purchase Order Item app for the Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery use cases, respectively.

3. Proactive Notifications to Appropriate Recipients 

By configuring the situation type for the two use cases outlined above, notifications may be enabled for display to recipients on SAP Fiori launchpad.  

Figure 4: SAP Fiori notification for Pending Supplier Confirmation.

Figure 5: SAP Fiori notification for Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery.

Note: The notification text may be customized to business needs, and notifications can be configured to display information for individual documents, or at an aggregated level.  Clicking on a notification takes you to the related apps, such as Monitor Supplier Confirmations or Manage Purchase Orders, with the relevant purchase documents pre-filtered.  

Additionally, filters and recipients are also assigned in the configuration of the situation type. This ensures that the appropriate recipients are notified about issues in the correct subset of purchasing documents. 

Pending Supplier Confirmation can be configured with filters on numerous key fields in the purchasing document, such as Company Code, Purchase Organization, Purchasing Group, Plant, Supplier, Material Group, and so on, to restrict the monitoring to those documents. See Figure 6.   

Figure 6: Filters on Pending Supplier Confirmation.

Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery can also be configured with filters on certain key fields in the purchasing document, such as Supplier, Material, Deficit Quantity, and so on. However, the options here are limited compared to Pending Supplier Confirmation.  

Figure 7: Filters on Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery.

As for how the recipients are assigned, the integration of Responsibility Management and the associated Manage Teams and Responsibilities app makes it possible to do so. These recipients may be assigned based on the Responsibility Definition and Member Functions of enabled Procurement Teams as part of the Responsibility Management set up. For more information on this topic, see link.  

Besides the SAP Fiori launchpad notifications, you can also use the My Situations app to access the situation instances. Open situations are displayed and updated automatically after the scheduled batch job runs or as the recipients manually mark each instance as complete after resolution.   

Figure 8: My Situations app displaying open situations.

In summary, Situation Handling use cases for Pending Supplier Confirmation and Quantity Deficit in Supplier’s Delivery can provide significant value in the supplier confirmation feature of the procurement process. It does so by eliminating the task of monitoring supplier confirmations manually. This allows timelier notifications of pending supplier confirmations and quantity deficits in delivery quantity and frees up the purchasers so they can focus on following up with suppliers and taking care of other business-critical tasks. Ultimately, this leads to a more efficient supply chain, lower inventory and material planning issues, and customer order fulfillment and satisfaction.