Signature Process with Signature Strategy

Use

You use the multilevel signature process with signature strategy if more than one user must sign the document to be signed. All signatures must be provided in the sequence you specified in Customizing for the signature strategy. The signature process is only completed when all individual signatures were executed successfully.

The signature process can thus have the following statuses:

Signature Status	Status Description
	New signature process
1	Completed signature process
2	Canceled signature process
3	Current signature process

Example

As more than one person must sign, the following situations can occur in the signature process:

After the first signatory has signed, the signature process is not yet completed and remains in the status Current signature process.
The next signatory can now either sign or cancel his or her signature (function key Cancel Individual Signature).
If the whole signature process is canceled using the function key Cancel Signature Process, this signature process then has the status Canceled Signature Process. If the application then wants the signature object to be signed again, in this case a completely new signature process must be started. Even the signatories that had already provided a signature successfully in the previous signature process must sign again in the newly started signature process.

Prerequisites

You have made settings in the following activities in Customizing for the signature strategy:

Define Authorization Groups

In this Customizing activity, you define the authorization group that can provide a specific individual signature when executing signature strategies. You use authorization groups if individual signatures are to be executed in succession by different groups of users, such as production operators, shift managers, and QM employees, and this process is to be implemented with a signature strategy. This has the advantage that an individual signature is only executed when the system has verified that the correct user group was assigned to the user for this individual signature.

In the user master record, you must then assign each user the authorization for the authorization group that corresponds to the user's area of responsibility (authorization object C_SIGN_BGR). Depending on the application, it may also be necessary to assign the authorizations for the C_SIGN authorization object.
Define Individual Signatures

In this Customizing activity, you define the digital individual signatures that must be executed by users in a specific authorization group and assign the authorization group. You can then use the individual signatures as substeps of a signature strategy.
Define Signature Strategies

In this Customizing activity, you make the following settings:
- Signature method
- Sequence of individual signatures
- Release statuses
- Comments and remarks
- Display document to be signed
- Verification

Features

Within the scope of a signature process, the following functions are available:

Selection of a remark
Entry of a comment
Display of a document
Display of the history

You can use the function key History to display the data for the signatures already executed in a signature process.
Cancelation of individual signatures
Cancelation of the signature process

More Information

For more information about the activities that must be implemented by the application, see the section Implementation of Multilevel Signature Processes versus Simple Signature Processes in the Implementation Guide in Note 700495 Information published on SAP site .