It is well established by now that business processes requiring repeated manual data entry, paper transport and/or approvals or intervention from a diverse group of users can hamper productivity, increase cost and introduce systemic risks in any organization. When such processes involve enterprise business applications such as SAP, they need to be brought under a controlled framework, or the promised ROI could be elusive. Workflow technology has been around for a while now, and promises such a controlled and consistent framework. In general, if all of the following checkpoints are valid for any business process, it is a good candidate for a workflow-based transformation:
- Are different people involved in the process?
- Is the processing time critical?
- Is process tracking or auditing critical?
- Is the process consistency critical?
- Is the cost of failure high?
- Let’s not be purist and go for the seemingly simpler solution. Business process transformation is not another IT academic exercise
- Custom ABAP based task management interface provides better UI possibilities as we are not limited to the constraints of the SAP inbox
- ABAP skills are more widely available
- Debugging problems are easier with no workflows involved
- Perception (as misguided as it may be) that SAP HR is needed to define workflow roles
- Personnel changes require involvement of IT resources as a business user cannot manage the workflow roles
- Users are given optimal UI for specific tasks; no need to use the SAP inbox
- The use of workflow only for core services ensures that workflow templates are stable, reducing the need for workflow skills. All business rule changes are managed through configuration or ABAP exits.
- ABAP-based routing that uses custom tables with references to work centers ensures that no SAP HR is needed. Business users can be given pointed access to user/group assignments through IMG-like table and work center maintenance.
- Debugging is easier since the business logic is in ABAP
- Standard SAP “out of the office” assignment and substitution options just work
- Non-SAP users can be involved in this workflow through the use of events that can be triggered through the SAP NetWeaver gateway or another implementation of simple REST-based APIs that can be triggered from mobile devices