Reverse Engineer your SAP WF learning?

I am not an educator by any means.  But I am a learner.  And sometimes I feel as though I need to get my hands ON something in order to understand it.  I remember someone once told me that writing something down helped a person to learn.  I’ve found that to be true, over the years.

And it turns out there is real science behind that. 

I have also had the experience of doing VAK worksheets with one of my kids.  The results were surprising – I would have thought our learning styles were diametrically opposed, but they weren’t.  You can learn more about Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic learning by going here. 

So it’s good for all of us to know what particular styles of learning suit us best.  When it comes to software, for me, it’s all about the nuts and bolts. I like to click, dig in, and drill down to see what happens when, and why.

Are you the same way?

Perhaps you’ve taken all the SAP offerings on, for instance, SAP Business Workflow.  Maybe you’ve done the tutorials found here.   (See, I’ve included a visual for those who are more visual-spatial than others 😉 )

You may have turned on a workflow or two also, which is great!

But did you know there is a highly secret transaction which will allow you to test out MANY different workflow techniques?

Do you want to test out Wait Steps? Or perhaps Deadline Monitoring? What about testing out an Asynchronous Method?

Got you covered.

Transaction SWUI_VERIFY will give you over 50 (in ECC) test workflows using a variety of techniques that you can start with a button. 

You can then use your favorite workflow reporting tool (mine is SWI2_FREQ, but we’ve already discussed that) to see which SAP-delivered workflow was started, and then drill in to examine the details.  Drill into the containers to see what’s what in there. 

Go on out to PFTC_DIS and view the workflow definition as a whole.  Find out what is really behind these workflow techniques. 

Later in life, as you encounter real life challenges that you are being asked to solve with workflow, you can think back and say ‘Hmmm, yes, I may have seen something like that’.

You can also copy these WF_Verify* templates and then you can play with them.  That’s how the hands-on learning works best (for me).

Conclusion

So I do recommend that you familiarize yourself with what works best for you as a learning strategy.  And if you are into learning about SAP Workflow, try out SWUI_VERIFY.

Already done that?  Share your comments with the community.  That may be almost as good as writing it down with paper and pencil.