When do you use SAP workflow?

The following factors need to be considered to decide whether sap workflow should be used for the business situations.

1. Human factor: SAP workflow is more appropriate for the automation of business processes which involve people. As discussed in our example, there is human intervention, i.e subordinate submits leave application, superior approves the same and so on.

2. Repetition: SAP workflow is usually used to automate repetitive, mundane business scenarios which are carried out at good frequency.

3. Sequence: More importantly, the business process process which should be automated should follow a predefined sequence of steps.

4. Costs: The time and cost (saved in avoiding paper based flow of work, enabling automatic task distribution and monitoring of tasks) need to be considered versus the effort involved in implementing workflows.

5. Structure: The organization should be structured, to allow for automatic routing of tasks to superiors and so on.

Workflow Terminology

There are certain primary terms which are of utmost importance for you to get started with workflows. Throughout the lesson, we shall describe these terms in the light of the leave application approval procedure that we have discussed earlier. Please note that leave application approval is henceforth referred as “Notification of absence”.

EVENT: An event represents an action in the system. For example, “Creating Absence Notification” is an ACTION. For this action the SAP Application creates an event. This event in turn triggers a workflow.

OBJECT: Workflow routes the document among different persons. Each person performs certain activities. Whatever goal the workflow is intended to achieve, can be put inside an object type. Consider an Object as a Structure     ( Abstract Enclosure ) with certain data and some logic. For example, there is a standard object type called FORMABSENC in SAP. This is used for the notification of leave. It has certain data and some logic. If you are familiar with Object Oriented Programming then this concept will be pretty familiar and straight forward.

Data
- KEY ( Absence Notification Number )
- ATTRIBUTES (Created By , Entered on , Status etc )
Logic
- METHODS ( Create, Approve etc )
-EVENTS ( Created, Deleted etc )
An OBJECT is a specific instance of the OBJECT TYPE. So, if an user created a Leave Application Form Object of type FORMABSENC , an instance with a unique number ( say 100001 ) is created.

TASK: An SAP workflow task represents an activity. It serves a purpose here. Some examples of tasks are Revise Absence Notification, Approve Absence Notification etc. The task Approve Absence Notification performs a business function – Submits the relevant absence notification form to the manager and on approval , it changes the status of the form to Approved and so on.  How does it perform this function ? It follows the logic created inside the method of an object type. So , in simple terms, a workflow TASK refers to the method of an object type.

BUSINESS WORKPLACE & WORKITEM: Business Workplace is a work area that an SAP user can use to carry out business Processes. For example, the business workplace of an user could be his inbox. Let us take the example of the absence notification again. The employee submits the notification to his manager. The manager receives the request in his inbox to approve the absence notification. The manager opens it , checks the details and approves the same. The request that the manager receives in this inbox is called a WORK ITEM. In technical terms, a work item is a run time request of a task in real time. Inbox contains not just the work items – it may as well contain simple text message. Examples include Notification messages, that need not be acted upon and are just used to inform the owner.

AGENT: An Agent is a person who executes a work item. In our example, manager Mr. John is the agent of the workflow task ‘approve absence notification.

• Possible agent is the person who is eligible to execute the work item. The name of the possible agent is mentioned in the workflow task.
• Responsible agent is the person who should execute the work item, or who is responsible for acting on the work item.Name of the responsible agent is mentioned in the workflow step.
• Excluded agent is the person who should not execute the work item, name of the excluded agent is mentioned in the workflow step.John is a manager at the Southern Zone of an organization. Any manager can execute the task „approve absence notification‟ in general. Meaning all the managers have the expertise, authority and eligibility to execute the task of approving. They are the possible agents who can execute the task. Hence, in the task, we mention the job ‘manager’ as the possible agent. This applies to all the managers in general.
  But, it is not a good idea to send the request for approving absence notification to all the managers. We have to select one responsible person, who should act on it. So, in the workflow step, we specifically mention the name of the manager ‘John’. He is called the responsible agent.
  There might be a requirement that managers of Northern Zone only should not be able to check/approve the absence notification. In that case we mention the job ‘Manager – Northern Zone’ as the excluded agent of the workflow step.
  Hence, the system sends the work item to the responsible agent who is also the possible agent and not the excluded agent. In this example, the system sends the work item to John who is also the manager and not the northern zone manager.

STEP: Steps are the building blocks of a workflow. In other words, a workflow consists of steps arranged in a sequence. A step in general refers to a business activity. A step can therefore refer to an activity where it refers to a task.  Eg., a step is created that refers to the task of approving absence notification or a user decision where the receiver of the notification has to decide on an „Approval‟ or a „Rejection‟ or a document from a template where a document can be edited from within a workflow. Steps can also refer to other programmatic conditions like loops, conditions, forks ( creation of a child process ) etc.

RULE: As discussed earlier, in the workflow task, as a responsible agent, we need to mention the name of the person who should execute the work item of approving absence notification. This method of specifying directly, the user name or job or position is called fixed agent assignment. But in some cases, we may want to determine the agent at run time, i.e when the workflow task is actually executed.
Then, instead of specifying the manager’s name, we specify a RULE ‘superior of workflow initiator’. What does this rule perform?
It takes the employee as input, refers to the organizational plan,checks who the superior of the employee is, at that point in time, and sends the work item to his inbox. This method is called RULE RESOLUTION.

WORKFLOW:
Lets summarize the term SAP workflow and how these key terms are linked together.
1. Workflow engine automates business processes.
2. Workflow can be triggered by an event.
3. Workflow definition consists of a sequence of steps.
4. Each step can be an activity which is nothing but a task.
5. Task in turn refers to a method of a workflow to implement a specific logic.
6. Steps can also refer to user decision, and other programattic controls.
7. Runtime reprsentation of the step is called a work item.
8. This work item sits in the inbox(business workplace) of the responsible agent assigned to the step.
9. Agent determination can make use of Rule.

What is SAP Workflow?

Lets go by the very basic meaning of workflow.

Workflow, as the name suggests, means ‘FLOW OF WORK’ from one person to another person. It is, in fact, a sequence of connected activities, resulting in exchange of information.

Let us consider a simple example, i.e “Application of Leave”.

It consists of the following activities.

Step 1: Employee submits a leave application form to his manager. He fills in details like his name, dates of absence, reason for leave etc

Step 2: Manager checks the details of the leave application

Step 3: In case, he finds that the reason for taking leave is inappropriate or not specified properly, he may reject the leave application.

Step 4: The employee corrects the leave application, specifying the leave reason properly and submits the application again.

Step 5: The manager finally approves the leave application.

Please note that there can be many variations of the business process. A simple case is discussed here to give your understanding of workflow a good start. The procedures can in fact be complex, involving many decisions and approvals.

Let us discuss few more classic workflows.

1. Credit memo request release:

• Suppose a company sells 100 pieces of shirts to a customer for Rs.10, 000, of which 20 pieces are defective, as complained by the customer. The company decides to give refund of Rs.2000 to the customer accounting for the 20 defective pieces. Or, to discuss a different scenario, the company has forgotten a discount amount of Rs.2000 on an invoice of Rs.10,000.  In either of these cases, the company sends a credit memo worth Rs.2000 to the customer.

• Sales process of a company usually involves the creation of a credit memo request first, before creating a credit memo. The sales clerk may have to create a credit memo request worth Rs.2000. Authorized person, may be the division manager, may have to release this credit memo request so that credit memo can be created and sent to the customer. Depending on the value of the credit memo request, the authorized persons may vary.

2. Recruitment:

• The applicants’ information is recorded in the system.
• Applicants are assigned to vacancies.
• The personnel officer checks the applicants data against the vacancies and may accept/reject/put on hold.
• If the application is approved, job interviews can be conducted.
• On rejection of the application, rejection letters are sent to the applicants.
• When the applicants are put on hold until a particular date, one needs to monitor and reconsider these applications against the vacancies until the date, to see if they fit the vacancies or can be rejected once for all.

3. Travel:

• Employee enters a travel request which holds the following data. Travel request is therefore, the first step that an employee takes to initiate his travel.

• Travel request is forwarded to his superior for approval.
• The superior can approve the travel request or reject it, send it back to the employee for correction.

In a typical office administration, these workflows are paper-based. Meaning, an employee has to fill his leave application paper, the clerk may submit it at the manager’s desk. The manager may scribble rejection reasons on the paper and send it back to the employee. The employee may have to fill a new application paper and resubmit. There are many disadvantages with such paper based flow of work. Let s discuss a few of them.

1.  Lack of Transparency: There is no easy way to track the status of the leave application. We probably have to inquire the manager personally to see whether he has approved the application or not. There is no system recorded status that one can glance at, to know the current status of the leave application.

2.  Long lead times: Based on a customer feedback survey, it is found that a traditional paper based workflow which involves three people typically takes seven days to complete.

3.  Lack of deadline monitoring: Who knows, the manager might just be sitting on the task for too long without approving it. There is no mechanism in place to ensure that the person performs the task within the planned time period.

4.  High costs: Paper based workflows are very costly to support as a result of manual document processing and archival.

Hence there is definitely a need to automate the business processes like the ones we just discussed. SAP Workflow is a cross application tool that helps us automate the business scenarios and incorporates certain features to address the issues mentioned above.

The following example is addressed to those of you, who are not aware of the credit memo request process.

Ø Suppose a company sells 100 pieces of shirts to a customer for Rs.10, 000, of which 20 pieces are defective, as complained by the customer. The company decides to give refund of Rs.2000 to the customer accounting for the 20 defective pieces. Or, to discuss a different scenario, the company has forgotten a discount amount of Rs.2000 on an invoice of Rs.10,000.  In either of these cases, the company sends a credit memo worth Rs.2000 to the customer.

Ø Sales process of a company usually involves the creation of a credit memo request first, before creating a credit memo. The sales clerk may have to create a credit memo request worth Rs.2000. Authorized person, may be the division manager, may have to release this credit memo request so that credit memo can be created and sent to the customer. Depending on the value of the credit memo request, the authorized persons may vary.