In SAP ERP there was standard functionality provided across most business objects that allowed for the creation of certain events, against those business objects, when their status changed. E.g. When a sales order is created the event "CREATED" for business object "BUS2032" was created.
Using transaction SWEL we could browse the events that were triggered by the various business objects. In the screenshot below we can see that a sales order was created on 3/26/2019 @ 14:48:39. We can also see that we can tie a receiver to an event (See BUS2012 - Purchase Order - Event "RELEASESTEPCREATED" is tied to workflow WS20000075) This is key functionality because we can leverage these events to trigger subsequent / follow-on functionality without impacting the transaction processing of the original document.
So now the question is...
Does this standard Business Object Event functionality exist in the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Application?
Yes, SAP does provide for this in the form of Business Event Handling.
SAP provides a catalog of Business Events for all objects on the SAP S/4HANA cloud application. Customers and partners can then leverage \ consume these events much like I described above with Business Object events in SAP ERP.
Customers and partners can leverage Event Activation Management to propagate subscribed events to the messaging infrastructure. A subscriber to an event is much like the receiver of an event described above for SAP ERP. These subscribed events can then be consumed in side-by-side extensions, to SAP S/4HANA cloud, allowing you to provide enhanced functionality without disrupting the core SAP S/4HANA transaction. An example use case: On order creation you could send an event to an email extension which could wrap up the order data and send a copy to an interested party.
So how can we access these events?
Firstly, as an administrator, we access the applications via the SAP Fiori Launchpad. The administrator needs the role SAP_BR_ADMINISTRATOR to access the apps below.
Business Event Subscription - Subscription Manager App
The administrator can view the list of current event subscriptions.
They can create (activate), update or delete (deactivate) a subscription.
They can also change the priority (1 to 10) of a subscription.
Results can be filtered by various fields as shown in the filter section in the screenshot below.
Business Event Queue App
The administrator can view the number of events that are in the queue.
The results can be filtered by various dimensions. E.g. By Business Object Type and Subscriber.
This functionality is not to be confused by what is provided by SAP Event Management or SAP Global Track and Trace. This functionality is equivalent to the Business Object Repository events of SAP ERP. There is no functionality provided to correlate these events in to a business process, match the event with the plan for that event or capture extra information on an event when it occurs (e.g. the temperature at the time of the event). The intention for this functionality is to be an input provider for the likes of other applications that include SAP EM, SAP GTT, ...
If you have any further questions please feel free to reach out to me at kevin@erpgenie.com.