BUSINESS FUNCTIONS

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
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
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:
o New menu entries
o New fields on the user interfaces
o Customizing activities required for the implementation
o New table entries in Customizing tables and system tables
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:
o Navigation to the business function description
o Navigation to the release notes relevant for the business function
o Navigation to the sample test catalogs for the business function
For more information, see Working with Test Case Templates
o 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.
o 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
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.