SAP Workflow Improvements (courtesy of SAP Customer Connection) – Part 2

As I noted yesterday, an SAP Customer Connection Call took place on January 11, 2016.  This blog will summarize the next set of features that have been delivered as part of the SAP Influence activity.   The formal announcement, with links to the recording, can be found here.

And, just as in yesterday’s blog, all images are courtesy of SAP and property of SAP.

Note 2241028 – Being able to forward workitems is a very powerful feature within SAP Workflow.  If you are the intended recipient, and will not be able to complete the workitem, or if you need someone else to provide information on it, you can forward the workitem.  Except this also has unintended consequences… sometimes you forward to the wrong person (for example, John Smith in Purchasing should not get the Invoice Approval, but John Smith in some other organization should) or your organization is required to keep stricter rules over what can be forwarded, when, and to whom.  This note delivers the BADI WF_WI_FORWARD, which will allow you to control forwarding according to your company’s rules.

Note 2201454 – Automatic alignment of the workflow model

When you are working with a really large workflow (say, one with 10 or more tasks 😛 ) you may get frustrated with always having to ‘align’ the model.  You know, sometimes all the tasks are bunched together, or the branches look like something out of a nightmare. This is due, in part, to the way that the workflow build system saves your model.  SAP has delivered a setting to eliminate this frustration via your personal workflow settings.

Note 2200416  – You may not always want the automatic generated binding in your data flows.  I believe the system looks for the first element of the same length and type of the task you are inserting, so pushing ‘OK’ on the generated binding popup may cause the system to create elements which are not used.  I’ve seen this myself.  And while you can always go back and correct the binding itself, you might not notice (or take the time to get rid of) the generated element.  I’m sure over time there would be system deprecation if you allowed this practice to continue.

Note 2250126 – Send mail step error when no recipients – well, this is HUGE!  We diligently try to ensure that there are always recipients to messages, but after maybe 10 years of being assured that everybody in the HR Org structure will ALWAYS have an email address, one day you find out that it’s    just    not    true.

Enabling the Sendmail task to have an outcome (perhaps just allow the workflow to continue on?) will be a real relief.

I can see by the clock on the clubhouse wall that I am almost out of time on this blog… So please consider how much time you could save by not having to go investigate and correct SendMail tasks that have gone astray.  (Actually, I noticed that this blog was accidentally published while I was editing it, so I apologize if you’re an early reader and wondering ‘where the heck did this thing go….’)

Cheers to all.