What's Changing in FSCM - Dispute Management in S/4HANA Compared to ECC

I wish for a world without any dispute, but the reality is that in every sphere of business there are chances of dispute. While running a business, customer disputes can impact organization’s financial stability and creditability.

SAP FSCM - Dispute Management helps in identifying and documenting disputes earlier in the payment cycle, track and monitor reasons that drive DSO (Days Sales Outstanding) and streamline process of dispute resolution while fully integrated with FI. Key process steps in FSCM - Dispute Management are as below:

FSCM - Dispute Management is not a new functionality and was existing in ECC environment also, so what’s really changing in FSCM is of great interest for organizations converting/adopting S/4HANA. Let’s see key changes in detail:

Transactional Simplifications

• The core attributes of dispute case are the same in S/4HANA as in ECC, but the transaction processing has been simplified a lot in S/4HANA. See below highlights of such transactional changes:
  
  Process Receivables (Fiori ID F0106)

Process receivables Fiori application is under FSCM - Collection Management, but fully integrated to FSCM - Dispute Management. E.g. in below Figure 1 for Process Receivables app, you have the option to see the dispute cases for the customer and can also create new dispute cases for outstanding items. 

Figure 1: Dispute Management integrated to Collection Management

When creating the dispute case, the screen as showing in Figure 2 below is also having very specific relevant fields for user to create the dispute case: 

Figure 2: Simplified entry screen for dispute case creation

Various disputes for the custom will appear at the same place as shown in Figure 3 below:

Figure 3: Displaying dispute cases for the customer in Process Receivables app

• Manage Dispute Cases (Fiori ID F0702)

This fiori application helps in managing the dispute cases as shown in Figure 4 below. Here you can change the processor for multiple dispute cases in single go. Or can go inside the particular dispute case to change its’ attributes:

Figure 4: Unified dashboard to show various dispute cases to process

On opening a dispute case, you can change the other attributes like root cause code, person responsible, reason etc. as shown in Figure 5 below (The attributes are same as in ECC environment.)

Figure 5: Changing the attributes of a dispute case

• Other Fiori Applications of GUI type:

There are various other fiori applications available, like Write off dispute cases (Fiori ID UDM_AUTOWRITEOFF) which are of GUI type, i.e. the look and feel is similar to SAP GUI transaction codes so the processing will not be impacted in S/4HANA environment for such transactions. For example, Figure 6 show the screen like GUI transaction UDM_AUTOWRITEOFF

Figure 6: Fiori application of GUI type

Analytical Innovations

Analytical power is core capability in S/4HANA and it provides a lot of out-of-the-box analytical applications, which shows the key KPIs on the tiles page as shown in Figure 7 below: 

Figure 7: Analytical apps showing KPI information for dispute management

Let’s see some more drilldown into these analytical apps on what kind on information these are showing:

• Overdue Receivables in Dispute (Fiori ID F2540) 

Figure 8 show the overdue receivables in dispute cases and thus represent directly the working capital having less probability of realization. The analysis can be done from various angles, like by company code, by customer, by processor etc.:

Figure 8: Fiori application - Overdue Receivables in Dispute

• Open Disputes (Fiori ID F1752)

Figure 9 show the open dispute cases and analysis can be done from various angles, like by customer, by processor etc.:

Figure 9: Fiori application - Open Disputes

• Solved Disputes (Fiori ID F2521)

Figure 10 show the closed dispute cases and analysis can be done from various angles, like by processor, by dispute case, by processor etc.: 

Figure 10: Fiori application - Solved Disputes

• Processing Days of Open Disputes (Fiori ID F2522) 

Figure 11 show the processing days of open disputes and thus helps in prioritization of the cases for follow-up. The analysis can be done from various angles, like by coordinator, by dispute case, by customer etc.:

Figure 11: Fiori application - Processing Days of Open Disputes

Role based menu in Fiori Launchpad

SAP S/4HANA provides Fiori Launchpad and thus all the related fiori applications for the user to manage dispute cases can be placed in single catalogue for ease of processing as illustrated in below Figure 12:

Figure 12: Fiori application - Processing Days of Open Disputes

Integration with external application(s)

You can define external applications that allow you to process dispute cases outside of SAP Dispute Management. In the out-of-the-box settings, the SAP application “CRM Claims Management” is defined as an external application.

Lighting fast processing powered by HANA platform

FSCM – Dispute Management is also not secluded from proven processing speed benefit of HANA. 

The processing in new transactional apps is faster because of simplified accounting data structure in backend, fewer data fields to fill and fewer steps to perform the dispute transactions.

In a nutshell, S/4HANA increases the utility for dispute management function and intensify the business case compared to using any third-party tool for this function.