Fiori Inbox – How?

As part of the continuous improvement SAP has come up with various workflow approval options for SAP business workflows which gives the user various options to execute applications using workflows.

SAP has tried to separate the applications from business workflows specifically in few areas of HCM like travel management and leave however this approach has confused a lot of customer in case of usage.

SAP today provides following workflow execution options.

1. POWL

2. Unified Inbox

3. Fiori Inbox

4. SAP ERP inbox

5. Universal Inbox in case of JAVA stack

Unknowingly SAP has created complexity for self however the reality differs.

With the release of SAP Fiori Inbox SAP provides the most unified way of executing workflows from one application across all platforms and devices.

A user as in any role can logon to Fiori inbox using his/her tablet, mobile or desktop. The application adopts according to the device used.

A Fiori inbox typically looks as shown above on a desktop. The inbox is capable to execute SAP and NONSAP workflows and we will talk about how can it be achieved.

In today’s world we have HCM, SRM, CRM having different technology used. We use java, BSP, SAP GUI, SAPUI5 and other various applications and objective of any implementation must be to integrate all these under one roof.

Lets get to business instead of talking at high level.

We have above scenario where a leave application is being sent to manager by employee, one as manager can take the action using the green and red buttons from your mobile or desktop. However you want the manager to see more details of applied leave apart from over view then you can click on open task and you can launch any application in the open task.

For example we cab launch a webdynpro application on click of open task as shown below from desktop.

The quick question that occurs in everyone’s mind is that how can this be done hence lets talk about that.

There is a class CL_SWN_URL_GENERATOR  which picks up values of task parameter that we store in SWFVISU transaction.

Which means that in above case the Sapnamespace, application, webdynpro component and dynpro parameter is picked by class CL_SWN_URL_GENERATOR.

Let’s look at the methods of this class.

The class carries each method that creates application url for different applications like webgui, ITS, java and abap webdynpro and BSP.

Let’s look at a bit of configuration required here. The configuration would depend on the gateway strategy. This configuration can be part of gateway system.

When you maintain the task name and decision options you can follow below example. Please note that the parameters totally depend on the applications. The parameters are very much maintained in SWFVISU and in case of above step below is what you will configure.

The decision text configured above will be visible as button text. You can enable or disable a comment field. Please note this comment field value is not stored in the workflow hence if you have a specific comment field in application or workflow then please do not expect this comment to match with the same.

I recommend you to keep above comment field unchecked as in most cases either workflow step or application has comments option.

Please note that to get the Step ID you will have to check your workflow.

Another example of how request can be configured for another process is shown below.

After above configuration if you check the training request then below is how it would look in the Fiori Inbox.

If you choose to open the task and view the details then below is the reference screenshot which your desktop browser will open.

you can check course details by clicking links under Objects and attachments.

Please make sure you also complete scenario definition configuration.

Define scenario

Consumer definition

You can define a role which can be assigned to consumer as shown below.

You need to define a system that the task gateway has to use. As generally if you have external gateway then this application would read the workflow from ERP system.

ERP_TASK would be defined in SM59 which will point to the ERP system.

This completes your scenario based task definition and this definition will refer to the parameters that are defined with the SAP Business Worklfow in SWFVISU and pull the respective parameter to form different URL.

With the effective usage of Fiori inbox you have single point of source in the system that can help you execute your process from Desktop Tablet and Mobile phones.

We have implemented the Fiori Inbox for a customer and the results are effective.