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With business functions, SAP provides new features and enhancements in self-contained units for your existing SAP installations. This enables you to use specific new features and enhancements for your various business processes.

Example Example

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

Therefore, you install only those technical components that you need in order to use business function X. After you install those technical components, other business functions are also available that were also part of the technical components you installed. But you activate only business function X.

After you activate business function X, the functions you want to use are then available. No other implementation activities are needed for all of your other business processes and applications; users can continue to work in them as they always have.

End of the example.

Prerequisites

  • Before installing the enhancement package, you obtained information about the business functions that you want to use for your business processes.

  • You have implemented the relevant technical components in your SAP installations dependent on the business function you chose.

Features

The business function concept has two aspects:

  • The business function as a self-contained entity comprising new software developments. This aspect also includes comprehensive material that you can use ahead of time to get information about the new developments, along with the technical components that have to be installed.

  • The business function as a technical object in your ABAP-based system. Along with this object, you also activate the new developments in your ABAP-based system using transaction SFW5.

Note Note

  • The business functions are only visible in transaction SFW5 if you have implemented the related software component versions.

  • You cannot undo the activation of a business function in a live system. Deactivating a specific, active business function is possible only for test purposes. For more information, see Deactivating Business Functions.

  • The processes that run in the background when you activate a business function need a certain amount of time. This means that you cannot see the changes in the system immediately after you activate the business function. You must also schedule a short downtime of approximately one half hour to an hour in the respective system.

End of the note.

You call transaction SFW5 in your ABAP-based system from the first Customizing activity in your Implementation Guide. It provides a series of functions that simplify the use of the new developments for you:

  • When you have activated a business function, the following changes and new developments are visible:

    • New menu entries

    • New fields on the user interfaces

    • Customizing activities required for the implementation

    • New table entries in Customizing tables and system tables

      Note Note

      Business Configuration Sets (Switch BC Sets) are also delivered with the business functions; these are unpacked automatically when you activate a business function. For more information, see SAP Notes 337623 and 877008.

      End of the note.

  • Transaction SFW5 gives you the following options for getting information about business functions and for scheduling their implementation:

    • Navigation to the business function description

    • Navigation to the release notes relevant for the business function

    • Navigation to the sample test catalogs for the business function

      For more information, see Working with Test Case Templates

    • Notes about the dependencies between business functions

      For some business functions you must also activate additional business functions. For notes about doing so, see the related description and the Dependencies column in transaction SFW5. It is not technically possible to activate business functions that exclude each other.

    • Analysis of the effects on your users of activating a business function. For more information, see Analysis of the Effects on the Users.

From a technical view, the business functions consist of individual switches that can be used to activate coding strings, menu entries, and Customizing activities in the Implementation Guide. For more technical information about the business functions and transaction SFW5, see Switch Framework.

Caution Caution

If you implement your own customer enhancements at the explicit enhancement options that SAP defined with the statements ENHANCEMENT-POINT or ENHANCEMENT-SECTION, these can be made ineffective by a subsequent release or enhancement package, or they can cause errors. Therefore we strongly recommend that you not use the enhancement options provided by SAP and defined with ENHANCEMENT-POINT or ENHANCEMENT-SECTION for your own customer enhancements. SAP does not guarantee that the interfaces and the existence of these explicit enhancement options will remain stable in the source code.

We recommend that you use , for example, Business Add-Ins (BAdIs) or implicit enhancement options instead. For more information, see Enhancement Framework.

End of the caution.

More Information

For more information about activating business functions, see SAP Note 908007.