Although the benefits gained by using SAP workflow are not of financial nature, the time saved by optimizing processes could easily be translated into money.
The advantages are as follows:
- 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 user 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.
A Short Summary of Workflow in SAP
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 flow chart 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.
