With NetWeaver CE Ehp1 SAP has announced the availability of the new BPM tool called Galaxy. There have been a lot of blogs in SDN talking about Galaxy and also showcasing a few use cases. This blog is the first part in a series of two (or maybe three) blogs about a new scenario where I talk about managing a master data management scenario with Galaxy and the new rules framework.
The first part details out the scenario, lists out notable features about the scenario and finally shows the scenario as modeled in Galaxy. The second part will contain more implementation details.
The process is that of a new business partner creation in MDM in the central MDM scenario. It can be demonstrated using the following diagram
Note that even though the diagram is for a vendor creation scenario it can be re-used in the business partner creation scenario as well.
Before we look at the process modeling in Galaxy here are a few things to note about the process:
§ 3 roles: Vendor Manager, Accounting Agent, Procurement Agent
§ Parallel enrichment of data by the Accounting Agent and the Procurement Agent
§ Manual/Auto approval of a record is based on a rule
§ DUNS number assignment is automatic (not entered by either of the agent roles)
From MDM perspective the things to note are:
§ In the first step of the process the Vendor Manager searches for a record in MDM and absence of appropriate results allow him/her to create a new record in MDM with the search parameters
§ All enrichments happen on an already created and checked-out record
§ Before persisting any change the record should undergo MDM validations defined in the repository
§ When a record is approved it is checked-in and the process ends
A few implementation considerations that are worth mentioning are:
§ Usage of the standard SAP delivered Business Partner repository
§ Web Dynpro for Java for the user interaction steps in the process
§ Auto or Manual approval of a record is based on the presence or absence of the SSN entry respectively for the record
§ Usage of MDM web services and Java APIs in cases where there were no web services
§ Role based access to the application for the two different agent roles
With all that in mind let's look at the process model in Galaxy. This blog is not about how to model processes in Galaxy and so I'll just put the final completed process model here. If you are interested in learning modeling with Galaxy you can find a lot of good resources about both Galaxy modeling and BPMN modeling (quick hint: search SDN for "Ginger Gatling Galaxy").
Looking at the process model you might have already noticed that there is a disparity between the original process specification and the modeled process. The first step of searching for a business partner by the Vendor Manager is missing from the Galaxy model! The reason is this: the process to create a new business partner is started only if the Vendor Manager chooses to do so.
Hence there is a need to remotely start the process and not a manual start via the NWA tool. The future parts of this blog will also show the implementation details of how to start a Galaxy process remotely.
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