What is SAP Business Function

Help document

Through business functions, SAP provides new features and enhancements in a standalone unit for your existing SAP installation. This enables you to use specific new features and enhancements for various business processes.

Business function X is provided with the enhancement package. This business function contains functions that allow you to run a given business process more efficiently. At this moment, you are not interested in the other features of the enhancement package.

Therefore, you only need to install those technical components required to use Business Function X. After installing these technical components, other business functions are also available, and they are also part of the technical components you install. But you only activate business function X.

After activating business function X, the functions you want to use are available. All other business processes and applications do not require other implementation activities; users can continue to work in them as usual.

Notice

Before installing the enhancement pack, you have obtained information about the business functions to be used in the business process.

You have implemented the relevant technical components in your SAP installation based on the business functions you have selected.

The business function concept has two levels:

(1) The business function as an independent entity that includes the development of new software. This aspect also includes comprehensive materials that you can use in advance to obtain information about new developments and technical components that must be installed.

(2) Business function as a technical object in an ABAP-based system In addition to this object, you can also use transaction SFW5 to activate new development in an ABAP-based system.

If you have implemented the relevant software component version, the business function is only visible in transaction SFW5.

You cannot undo the activation of business functions in the real-time system. Deactivate specific, active business functions only for testing purposes.

The process that runs in the background when the business function is activated requires a certain amount of time. This means that you cannot see the changes in the system immediately after activating the business function. You must also schedule a short downtime of about half an hour to an hour in the corresponding system.

After activating the business function, you can see the following changes and new developments:

• New menu item
• New fields on the user interface
• Implement the required customized activities
• New table entries in custom tables and system tables

The business configuration set (Switch BC Sets) is also delivered with the business function; when you activate the business function, these will be automatically unpacked.

For more information, please refer to SAP note 337623 and 877008.

From a technical point of view, business functions consist of separate switches that can be used to activate coded strings, menu entries, and custom activities in the implementation guide.

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If you implement your own customer enhancements in the explicit enhancement options defined by SAP using the statements ENHANCEMENT-POINT or ENHANCEMENT-SECTION, subsequent versions or enhancement packages may invalidate these functions or may cause errors. Therefore, we strongly recommend that you do not use the enhancement options provided by SAP and defined by ENHANCEMENT-POINT or ENHANCEMENT-SECTION for your own customer enhancements. SAP does not guarantee that the interface and the existence of these explicit enhancement options will remain stable in the source code.

Below is a screenshot of the transaction code SFW5:

The business switch associated with the business function:

Check the state of the switch in the code. If it is in an inactive state, the business function is not executed:

Reference code: CL_IM_CRM_PROD_RL_SUBTRACT

Business switch：CRM_PROD_SETTYPE_RL_SUBTRACT

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