Many of the Functional Consultants face issues in understanding what are the Roles and what are Authorizations in SAP. This is a document which would help people who are curious to know what is exactly the concept behind this and how does it work.
Functional Consultants have a lot of questions in mind regarding this concept and one of the main questions here is why should Functional Consultants worry about Roles and Authorization when it is a job of BASIS team.
Well, to answer this, it is not solely a job of BASIS team rather it is also like other activities, it an integrated activity which should be performed by both BASIS team and Functional team.
BASIS team have a know how about the User Management, Roles Creation, Profile Creation, Roles and Profile assignment, Authorization assignments etc. but main concern in most of the cases arises when the below questions are unanswered by BASIS team:
- Whom to Assign the Roles or transactions
- What to Restrict in a transaction and for whom
- How to authorize Custom transactions
and many more such questions cannot be answered by BASIS team. Hence, it becomes the role of a Functional Consultant to guide them with the exact process flow and exact organizational chart.
Explaining with a small example here, suppose we have a maintenance team as below:
- Supervisor – He is responsible for notifying the breakdown or Corrective Maintenance requirements
- Maintenance In-charge – He is responsible for assigning the above tasks to Engineers
- Head of the department – He is responsible for approving the Maintenance tasks.
Now, Functional Consultant is very well aware that for Supervisor would require only the transactions related to Notifications (say IW21, IW22, IW28, IW29 etc), Maintenance In-charge would require some of the notification related transactions (say IW22, IW28, IW29) and also order related transactions (IW31, IW32, IW38, IW39 etc) and the Head of the department would require notifications and order transactions (say IW28, IW29, IW38, IW39) and also along with this he require special permissions like releasing orders, approving permits, technical completions etc.
Looking from BASIS team’s perspective they are not clear with these requirements and they thus cannot take the decision for this and should be provided by Functional Consultants.
But, the main issue in most of the cases arises when Functional Consultants are not aware about the concept of Roles and Authorizations.
Hereby, this document will explain the basic concept of Roles and Authorizations:
