Many customers and partners seek guidance around the set up of flexible workflow within Materials Management (Purchasing). In this blog post I provide an overview of what is required to enable flexible workflow for Purchase Requisitions by document type, for SAP S/4HANA®.

After reading this blog you should be able to correctly configure your system to determine flexible workflow based on the Purchase Requisition document type.

General Overview

The customizing section is found in different places depending on your S/4HANA release level and so in some cases it can be hard to figure out where exactly to configure this. I hope to clear up any confusion around this.

Please find your S/4HANA release level below and then the relevant customizing path.

SAP S/4HANA 1709 & SAP S/4HANA 1809

The customizing path to follow within transaction SPRO is as follows:

Then when defining the document type, to activate flexible workflow the ‘Scenario based workflow’ flag needs to be checked:

For SAP S/4HANA 1909 and higher releases

The customizing path to follow within transaction SPRO is as follows:

Then when activating flexible workflow for Purchase Requisitions, for a particular document type the ‘Scenario based workflow’ flag needs to be checked:

Header or Item level Approval

So, for Purchase Requisitions flexible workflow is determined based on document type, you will also notice that in the same customizing space, per document type there are the settings for whether approval is on header or item level.

In the above screenshots if the checkbox ‘OvRelP..’ is selected this means for that document type approval is on header level. If this checkbox is not selected, approval will take place on item level.

This option is only available for Purchase Requisitions, all other documents for example, Purchase Orders or Contracts can only be approved on header level.

Further Customizing

There are further customizing steps to fully set up flexible workflow for Purchase Requisitions, for this please review the following Help documentation:

How to Configure the Flexible Workflow for Purchase Requisitions

Additional Resources

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post, please Share, Like and Comment below if you find this helpful or have any queries around this topic.

This blog post is only a part of customizing needed to activate flexible workflow for Purchase Requisitions. Here are some more resources for you to continue reading in order to get the full customizing set up:

Flexible Workflow in Sourcing and Procurement: Scenarios and Tasks Overview

Flexible Workflow for the Approval of Documents in Sourcing and Procurement

Define Visualization Metadata for My Inbox (for Purchase Requisitions)