Sap customer connection – substitutions

The option to use substitutions for the workflow tasks comes up in almost every time I show the workflow solution for a new process – it’s the answer to the “what do I do if a user is on vacation/sick?”  asked by the users.
It’s a very useful tool allowing substitutions to be set for multiple users actively, passively and with different substitution profiles.

Here are a issues on which we made improvments in the now active 🙂 workflow customer connection focus topic about the substitution:

• Substitution logs – there currently are none, a user can enter a workitem as a substitute, the workitem will be transferred to him/her but there will be no log of this action in the system, if for some reason there is a need to review the approvers of the workitem, there is no way to know that a substitution was activated which can cause audit problems since we have no way of knowing why did user B approver the task when
  user A was supposed to do so.
• Also there is no log of the substitution of user A by user B creation, since the substitution can be created by an admin (transaction RMPS_SET_SEBSTITUTE or custom development using the SAP_WAPI_SUBSTITUTE_MAINTAIN
  function module), we don’t know who created the substitution, and if the substitution was deleted, there is no record of its existence.
• Sometimes there is a need for additional filtering of the workitem in the substitution, for example:  a manager approves leave request of
  employees and has a lower level manager which is a substitute for leave request, which is good for all employees except the substituting  lower level manager himself.  currently by customizing you can limit the substation profiles by tasks, and there is a BADI which can limit the substations but only
  for the UWL… (or anything else using the SAP_WAPIs)
• Activation/Deactivation of substations can only be done using a specific entry in the SAP business workplace, when maintaining the substitution,
  you can deleted it and create it from the start, but not deactivate it…
• There is no report showing the substations in the system, there is a tab in SO16 which doesn’t show any, and you can look at the table, but no simple report exist.

You can support, comment, add your own requests in http://influence.sap.com/workflow2015