SAP HR ABAP, HCM Training Material and Tutorials

Introduction

On request we provide advanced online Training on SAP HR Functional and Technical .

1. Workflow Definition
2. Workflow architecture
3. Why Use of workflow and workflow templates
4. Basic Customizing settings in the SAP Business Workflow system
5. Inboxes: – Possible inboxes for work items

Workflow definition:

Workflow is the set of rules that determine the path that the process tasks.

For example, how a leave request is processed, from the initial request to the creation of leave request

SAP Workflow is a tool to automate complex business processes where there is more than one user involved.

SAP workflow maps the position in organization because SAP believes that Positions are more stable than the people.

SAP Workflow is a process tool that is designed to facilitate and automate business processes involving the tasks sequence performed by the users (people in the workplace) and ensure that the right work is assigned in the right sequence at the right time to the right person in the workflow.

The SAP workflow can be linked to other software tools such as Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes. Using SAP Workflow, each step of a business transaction can be easily monitored throughout the initiation and completion of the business processes. The SAP Workflow enables the process owners to track deadlines, determine the workload as well as provide statistics on the length of time to complete work processes.

The key components of the SAP Workflow include the Workflow Definition, Work Items, Events triggers and the Organizational Structure in the workplace.

Technically SAP Workflow is an integrated part of SAP application server.

Workflow Architecture

There are 3 layers in the Workflow Architecture:

• Process  flow layer
• Organization layer
• Business Object layer

Process Flow layer

An employee enters a notification of absence (leave request) in the R/3 System by filling out the relevant input template.

The direct superior of the employee is responsible for approving or rejecting the notification of absence.

The R/3 System determines the direct superior automatically on the basis of the organizational plan maintained.

If the request is approved the creator is notified by mail:

If the request is not approved, the creator is informed and can decide whether to withdraw the notification of absence or revise it.

If the superior has given reasons for the rejection in an attachment, the creator can take these into consideration.

If the creator revises the request, it is submitted to the superior for approval again. The applicant can also add an attachment, which can then be accessed by the superior.

This cycle is repeated until either the superior approves the leave request or the creator withdraws it.

The applicant can find out the current processing status at any time by looking in their workflow outbox.

Organizational layer:

The company-specific organizational plan describes the organizational assignment of an employee. This allows the responsibility of employees for performing individual business activities to be defined in the form of activity profiles.

The organizational plan is part of the PD component “Organization and Planning”. It is client-dependent. An organizational plan which was created for personnel management purposes (or is still to be created) can be used in SAP Business Workflow without any changes provided the workflow functionality and the personnel management application use the same client.

In each client you will however generally (only) represent the sub-areas and organizational structures of your company in which you also coordinate business processes using SAP Business Workflow.

This assignment is used to find the “correct” agents and allows tasks to be assigned actively by the workflow management system.

Transparency of the business processes and responsibilities is achieved. Changes can be made to the organizational structure of the company without changes needing to be made directly to the SAP Business Workflow definitions or programming performed in an application.

To create an individual activity profile for a user in a modular way and without redundancy, it is necessary to describe the organizational assignment of this user in the company-specific organizational plan

Business Object layer

Business object (BO) is basically collection of Attributes, Methods and Events for a particular business entity. Example of BO: Sale Order, Vendor, Customer, Material etc.

BOs wrap around backend tables, application code, change document and other technical information and expose them as Attributes, Methods and Events. Usually methods of BOs refer to BAPIs.

The following diagram explains BO much better:

Why Use of workflow and workflow templates

SAP Workflow ensures “the right work is brought in the right sequence at the right time to the right people”. It is a tool designed to facilitate and automate business processes that require tasks to be performed by people. Ideal for casual or non-SAP users, since all the work items can be performed outside of SAP by simply responding to an email, SAP workflow can be linked to Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes.

Each step of a business transaction can be easily monitored and processes are completed from the beginning to the end. Workflow allows process owners to keep an eye on deadlines, provides statistics on the length of time to complete work processes, determine the workload with regard to individual employees and save processing time.

Since Workflow delivers work items to employees automatically via email, they do not have to wait or inquire about the status of a particular transaction.

SAP Business Workflow can also be used to respond to errors and exceptions – it can start when predefined events occur. For example, an event can be triggered if particular errors are found during an automatic check of the data SAP workflow is particularly useful when there is a business process involving more than one person, when an automatic notification can replace a manual communication and when there is a defined set of individuals and/or documents implicated.

It organizes one’s work, alerts users and directs traffic by sending work items – once the user executes the work item, then another one can be sent to another user. For example, a Manager could use workflow to approve a vacation request from an employee. The workflow application would ensure that each person involved uses the correct online form and successfully completes their step before the planned leave was entered into SAP – either by an Administrator or automatically. By the same token, if someone registers for a training class, Workflow can act as an alert tool by notifying the supervisor in question or reminding the individual of an upcoming class.

Before implementing SAP Business Workflow, organizations should start by asking a series of questions,

such as: -

• Which HR processes do we want to automate?
• To what extent can we change current procedures and pass them over to electronic control?
• What steps are these procedures made up of?
• Who are the individuals involved and what are their roles?
• How do we get the Work item to go to the right people?
• Even though Workflow can be implemented via user-defined tables without the Organizational Management component in place, having a pre-defined organizational structure adds tremendous value and saves time.

A clear reporting structure made up of positions and position holders that is maintained by the HR department, ensures the ongoing ease-of-maintenance effort. The ability of HR personnel to add and delete users from positions as people come and go, without affecting your core workflows, is a tremendous long-term benefit. If you have Personnel Administration in place, employee’s email addresses can also be maintained by the HR department in addition to employee’s respective Time/HR and Payroll administrators who might be involved in the Workflow.

There are basically three options for connecting workflow to external email: Microsoft Outlook/Exchange, Lotus Notes or SAP Connect and Internet Mail. A key factor in SAP R/3 4.6 implementations and upgrades will be the use of a Web browser as the main workflow interface.

Benefits of SAP Workflow

Although the advantages gained by using workflow are not of financial nature, the time saved by optimizing processes could easily be translated into money. – The quality of your processes will be assured by sending relevant information directly to the user. Managers don’t have the time to search for information. For example if an employee obtains a qualification as a result of hard work or training, their Managers can be notified immediately. – Cycle time is reduced by providing all the necessary information needed: people can check their list of pending tasks and determine which tasks can be completed the next day without any negative impact. I.e. A Payroll Administrator might be notified immediately of an employee address change via ESS that might implicate taxes. – Workflow allows to monitor deadlines.

It could be used to remind employees of upcoming performance reviews or training or to send payroll year-end tasks items to the relevant Payroll Administrators. Deadline handing ensures that users perform the tasks within the time planned. Escalation measures ensure that the failure to meet a deadline can be corrected by other means. – Users can see at a glance how the process works and who will be selected to perform the different tasks, which creates a transparent work environment. – SAP contains Workflow templates, which can be used as a reference providing more than 200 Workflow samples. – Implementing Workflow will save costs. Ask yourself how much time is spent gathering information, getting hold of people, logging into different systems and trying to understand who to give a task to? How often does this current process fail and how labor intensive is it to fix it? Workflow reduces time and effort spent and the savings in days can be considerable.

How does it work?

There are several components of a workflow: Workflow Definition, Work Items, Triggering Events and at the Receiving end the Organizational Structure. The workflow definition is created in the Workflow builder and is made up of the various steps. Each step of the workflow definition can be a task pointing to a SAP transaction or a decision. A decision might contain specifications about agents and deadline monitoring for a step. The workflow is started either manually or by the system at runtime. For the system to start a workflow, the workflow definition must contain a triggering event (for example the event “Address update by the employee”). When the event occurs, the relevant workflow is started automatically. Tasks or Work items describe the activities involved and can refer to automatically executable methods (i.e. send an email to a supervisor) or they might need a user to execute them (i.e. supervisor has to go and click on a button in his workplace to approve something). Tasks refer to business objects, which are ABAP coding. Events are activities that trigger the workflow – one or several workflows at the time. Once the workflow is triggered, the definition flowchart determines when and in what order work happens. Work items are then received and executed in MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, mySAP Workflow MiniApp or the SAP integrated inbox. Alternatively, the workflow system can transmit e-mail notifications directly to any mail system, informing the user of the need to log in to the SAP system to execute the task. A work item is always assigned to one or more users. Once the task is executed, the work item vanishes from the other users’ inboxes.

Integration to Email systems

Usually executable work items are received in the Workflow inbox. But casual SAP users, especially Managers might forget to check their inbox at a regular basis and so it makes sense to set up reminder emails, informing people via a batch job that they have work items in their inbox. Alternatively, an email can be sent directly to their Lotus Notes / Outlook account with a hotlink to the Workflow inbox. All emails, whether they exists in the form of Workflow notifications, Workflow Work items, or just a standard SAP Office memo, are sent out of SAP through SAP Connect. This provides the all in one gateway between SAP and the mail server. The transport of workflow items between SAP Connect and the mail server (whether that’s Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook) has been facilitated by SAP provided add-ons that are fully optimized for the different protocols required for each server. Lotus Notes, for example, uses a ‘pipe’ called the MTA, or Message Transfer Agent. This was designed jointly between SAP and Lotus to provide full integration between the two systems.

It should be noted that the type of transport medium used is dependent on the mail server and not the mail client. In other words, if the employee uses Outlook on their computer but the mail server is a Lotus Domino server, the MTA would be the mail gateway used. Each workflow background user must have an email address stored in their user profile. It is note worthy that no approval or reply notification will be allowed from an external mail system – in other words external email systems cannot respond back to SAP for security reasons.

Looking ahead…

Workflow is becoming more and more web-oriented which allows external business partners to receive notifications. Companies can adopt Workflow together with “Webflow” where workflows can be initiated via Internet transactions and where different external business partners can receive notifications sent by the workflow. The Web inbox offers access to partner companies logging on to your Web portal and it refreshes itself automatically. Any type of work item can be executed directly from a centralized list of work items, no matter what graphical user interface is needed to run it. Webflow is particularly useful when a company deals with outside partners using different software platforms.

Workflows can make an ERP system more efficient by automating situations in which work processes have to be run through repeatedly, or situations in which the business process requires the involvement of a large number of agents in a specific sequence. It is essential that the Workflow consultant is an expert in ABAP development or has access to ABAP programmers since a good deal of the work is technical. You will also need someone familiar with Lotus Notes / Outlook concepts and development in order to create the interfaces between the systems. The Workflow consultant should also have experience in installing and integrating efficient electronic archive systems.

Basic Customizing settings in the SAP Business Workflow system

Before you can use the Workflow module, you must first execute the basic Customizing in transaction SWU3.

All of the listed points should be green (the number range for customer tasks is no longer required). A detailed description of the activities is provided in the relevant information buttons. You can also execute some (but not all) of the points using the Automatic Customizing button. See the online documentation for an exact description of what happens there. The RFC destination must work correctly and the user (usually WF BATCH) should have the SAP_ALL profile.

Inboxes: – Possible inboxes for work items

Use

The worklist of the user currently logged on to the Business Workplace is displayed in the workflow inbox.

Integration

As is the case for the workflow resubmissions and the workflow outbox, the workflow inbox is an integral part of the Business Workplace.

Features

Views in the workflow inbox

A user’s worklist can be displayed as an overview or according to the following grouping criteria:

Grouped according to task	The work items are grouped according to the tasks to which they belong.
Grouped according to content	The work items are grouped according to the object instances to which they belong.
Grouped according to content type	The work items are grouped according to the object types to which they belong.
Grouped according to sort key	The work items are grouped according to sort keys. Please refer to Grouping According to Sort Keys.

You can also choose from the following views:

• Overdue entries
• Deadline messages
• Incorrect entries
• Update

This function updates the worklist of the user currently logged on to the Business Workplace.

Worklist List of all work items that are assigned to a specific user at a particular time.

This user is one of the recipients of each work item.

The worklist is located in the workflow inbox in the Business Workplace.

Execute

To be executed, a work item must have either the status ready or the status in process.

When a dialog work item is executed, the object method to which the single-step task for this work item refers is carried out.

Dialog work item : Type W work item that represents a workflow step or a task at runtime, which requires dialog with the user. Dialog work items are usually displayed in the Business Workplace.

When a dialog work item that is based on a task is executed, the underlying object method is called. It is possible to monitor deadlines for dialog work item execution

When a missed deadline work item is executed, the most important information on the monitored work item is displayed.

Work item (type D) for notifying the message recipients for missed deadline. This work item is created by the runtime system if it discovers that a deadline has been missed for a work item, and notification is defined as reaction to this.

The notification takes place in the form of a missed deadline work item in the Business Workplaces of the relevant recipients. The recipients are specified within the step definition. The message text is entered within the definition of the task to be monitored.

When a missed deadline work item is executed, the most important information about the monitored work item is displayed.

Display work item

This function goes directly to the work item display

Reserve (dialog work items only)

This reserves a work item for execution by the end user in question. The work item must have the status ready. This work item is then no longer visible to the other recipients who could previously see it in status ready. The status of the work item changes from ready to reserved.

Replace (dialog work items only)

Replacing releases the work item from its reserved status and makes it available again to all of the original recipients. The status of the work item changes from reserved back to ready. The status of the work item must be reserved before it can be replaced.

Forward

Forwarding passes a work item on to another employee for execution.

Resubmit

If a user chooses this function, the selected work item is placed in workflow resubmissions.

Display workflow log

This function displays the workflow log.

Manage attachments … (Functions for attachment management, dialog work items only)

Display attachments

Create attachments

Change attachments

Delete attachments

More functions

Set to ‘Done’

Reject execution

Execute together

Change priority

Send mail

Change work item

Environment

Display objects in workflow (dialog work items only)

Display workflow relationships

Start Workflow

Create link

Activities

You can access the workflow inbox in the tree on the left in the Business Workplace via Workplace ? Inbox.

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