ChaRM Approval Procedures: Flexible or Messy?

[RiccardoEscher]

We have customized for our RfC YMCR some additional approval procedures in order to cover our approval governance.

The approval procedure value help in the "Change Planning" section of the RfC Header shows as expected only the approval procedures which are customized for this transaction type:

When you change the approval procedure the steps in the Approval Procedure Assignment Block are replaced with the one which are customized for the new approval procedure.

So far so good.

BUT!

When you add manually an additional step, you will get a dialog showing all approval steps which exist in the current client! So the user might select approval steps which are not customized for the current transaction type (green allowed by YMCR customizing, red: forbidden by customizing):

And worse! The wrong approval step might be bound to a partner function which doesn't exist in the current partner schema. So the system takes the key-first partner function which is usually the Sold-To Party. The user can select any other partner function from the current partner schema, there is no guidance for selecting a partner function which makes sense for an approval. Here we let the tester approve the RfC:

Obviously I opened an incident in the sapnet, and after some time I received the following sequence of "answers":

1. Standard behaviour of F4 functionality; make the field uneditable (I didn't accept this workaround; if governance needs more stakeholders to approve you have to be able to insert them; I pointed out that other details like text types adhere to the customizing)
2. F4 search result can only be narrowed down based on a column in the search result (my answer was that if F4 help isn't able to provide the required functionality, then choose another functionality; by the way, the value help for the partner function works as expected)
3. Other customers are guilty for this strange functionality "We have different customers with different needs, you would like to have F4 search to be narrowed down but others would like to have the flexibility to choose."

So my question:

Is somewhere outside there a customer who really needs such a "flexibility" in the value help of the approval steps, i.e. the possibility to choose approval steps which don't belong to the current transaction type? I am really curious about the use case!

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Riccardo,

Yes this is standard behavior, when you choose steps system shows all and this is not yet controlled via anything...

And there is no binding step = partner function also.

But, my recommendation in this situation is:

f.e. you have 3 approval procedures app1; app2; app3;

first clean all steps.

now create maximum steps that you will need for approval procedure

let's say steps id will be like app_step1 to 5. all with same description (users will not be confused, all are same so its ok to choose whatever).

buid your approval procedures based on thouse 5 app_step IDs.

And finally play with partner function + any step.

f.e. if you need an approval from Business Integration Team.

procedure will be:

add manual step

choose any app_step1 - 5

choose partner function Business Integration Team

now you need to choose Business partner also (yes agree this looks weird, that we cannot yet bound this).

at finish you will get approval step for BIM to be approved by BIM.

the other good option is to use BRF+ where you can build a decision table that will allow to boundle in one string step id, partner function, business partner number.

if you implement this, you can make step id with meaning.

f.e. choose step BIM approval makes system to automaticaly fill partner function BIM and BIM's business partner.

p.s. You are not alone

Rg Dan.