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Author's profile photo Venugopal Chembrakalathil

Automate your Capital Expenditure Approval Process using SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management

Overview

Capital investments are part of every enterprise as part of their business strategy. Capital investments could be acquisitions, purchase of new assets including software and services. Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) involve reviews and decisions across different levels of an organization depending on the type and nature of the investment. Companies are looking for managing investment decisions in a transparent way by automating all the steps of this process. This will not only enable them to track every step and decision, but also ensure the corporate policies are followed as part of an investment decision.

Customers like Delivery Hero implemented Capital Expenditure Approval Process using SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management. Please go through the business transformation study of Delivery Hero.

SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management

Digital Process Automation is a key  theme in SAP Cloud Platform Extension Suite and SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management is a key Cloud service, part of Extension suite. SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management enable customers to automate processes, manage decisions and gain visibility into their end to end business processes.

Workflow Management – Live Process Content

Workflow Management offers live process content enable customers to consume out of the box production ready process content. A live process content consists of digital workflows, decisions, process visibility content including documentation and related integration content. These are process content across industries and line of business solutions published in SAP API Business Hub.

For e.g.: in Souring and Procurement

Capital Expenditure Approval Process is one of the live process contents available in SAP API Business Hub. This process content package contains process, decision and visibility scenario to manage Capital Investments in a company. It provides FIORI user experience to business users and enable them to do their tasks more efficiently. Customers could import, configure and deploy this content for automating their Capital Expenditure Approval process.

Discover and Configure Capital Expenditure Process 

SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management enable Line of Business experts to search and find Live Process content. A well-integrated FIORI launch pad provides access to live process content from SAP API Business Hub.

You can use the FIORI Launch Pad delivered with SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management to discover and configure live process content. The Process Flexibility Cockpit capability in Workflow Management enable a line of business expert to configure new variants of a process.

Process Flexibility Cockpit enable LOB experts to discover and configure process variants. Process Hub provides a view on SAP API Hub with all published  Live Process Content and LOB experts could Import content packages for e.g.: Capital Expenditure Approval Process.

Process Flexibility Cockpit enable LOB experts to discover and configure process variants. Process Flexibility Cockpit  also provides a view on the imported process content packages from SAP API Business Hub. You can choose content package Capital Expenditure Approval Process.

Process Flexibility Cockpit also provides a single view of all content in a package including

  • Process Variants in active and draft state.
  • Decisions consumed by the process variants.
  • Visibility Scenario and access to the scenario editor.
  • An aggregated view of current state of run time instances of a process area and access to process visibility workspace.

Process Flexibility Cockpit enable the LOB expert to navigate to a Low-code No-Code tooling, Process Variant Editor to configure and create new process variants.

A LOB expert could modify / drag and drop new Approval Steps, Save and Activate. This will generate a new cloud platform workflow and deploy to SAP Cloud Platform.

Manage Decisions

Decisions / business logic are part of every business process and owned by Line of business. SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management enable LOB uses to manage or govern decisions centrally in Cloud Platform but deploy decisions to different transnational systems like S/4 HANA and SAP Cloud Platform.

Capital Expenditure Approval Process using Decisions to

  • Determine Approvers of each step in the process
  • Calculate due date of a Capital Expenditure Approval Request

Process Flexibility Cockpit enable a LOB expert to Mange / Modify the policies and decisions.

Process Visibility

Process Visibility is a key capability in SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management enable customers to gain real time visibility into their end to end business process. It provides out of the box visibility to deployed workflows in Cloud Platform but also enable customers to extend this by pushing transactional events from other systems or applications like ECC, S/4 HANA, Ariba , SuccessFactors etc. including 3rd party systems.

LOB Experts could enhance or create new business scenario by consuming the transactional events and configure the process visibility workspace. The scenario editor is configuration based and do not require SAP UI5 expertise.

Create and Complete Capital Expenditure Approval Process

SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management provides FIORI user experience for business users. A Business user can create a request for Capital expenditure and respective approvers can approve tasks using My Inbox, part of Workflow Management.

 

Capital Expenditure Approval – Watch online demo

Please watch an end to end demo of Workflow Management – Capital Expenditure Approval Scenario.

Summary

SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management accelerate the digital process automation journey of customers by providing various services and content to lower the total cost of development and  ownership.

For more information please visit

SAP Cloud Platform Discovery Center

SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management – Help Portal

 

 

 

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      10 Comments
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      Author's profile photo Nilesh S Khedkar
      Nilesh S Khedkar

      Nice blog Venugopal quite informative. I have one question - does the below pre-build content in "Capital expenditure approval process" - becomes automatically available to us if we subscribe to "SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management" or will it need some additional licenses ?

      "Capital Expenditure process content package contains process, decision and visibility scenario to manage Capital Investments in a company. It provides FIORI user experience to business users and enable them to do their tasks more efficiently. Customers could import, configure and deploy this content for automating their Capital Expenditure Approval process."

      Author's profile photo Venugopal Chembrakalathil
      Venugopal Chembrakalathil
      Blog Post Author

      Hi Nitesh,

      It is available together with CP Workflow Management. All content is part of the standard Workflow Management license.

       

      thanks & regards

       

      Venugopal

      Author's profile photo Lisette Muntslag
      Lisette Muntslag

      I am taking the openSAP and it is very hands-on and informative. The topic is one of my favorites. Thank you!

       

      Regards,

      Lisette

      Author's profile photo Zainab Kaleem
      Zainab Kaleem

      Very well explained

      Author's profile photo Montse Empez Vidal
      Montse Empez Vidal

      Does it connect to Ariba in anyway for the PR?

       

      Author's profile photo Venugopal Chembrakalathil
      Venugopal Chembrakalathil
      Blog Post Author

      It only connect to SAP ERP. Are you looking for an approval workflow based on Ariba PR ?

      Author's profile photo Montse Empez Vidal
      Montse Empez Vidal

      Yes, we use Ariba for all our PR and POs

      Author's profile photo Guillermo Vera
      Guillermo Vera

      Congrats Venugopal Nice blog , One question about ERP integration, when the CAPEX Expenditure is approved, How you transfer the information to ERP: like an appropriation request (IM11) or maybe like an internal order (KO01)?

      Thanks and Regards

      Author's profile photo Velan Thangavelu
      Velan Thangavelu

      Dear Venugopal,

      We could be one of the few customers who took this solution and we have customized to our needs. There are some product issues that we raised to our account management team as well:

      • Forward/Share button does not work - as it only sends the email but does not give the access to the other person
      • When we delegate - we need to give the exact user id. If we dont, then the request goes into abyss. And it does not check if the user id is rightly selected with the system
      • We dont have robust role based access management ie we need to restrict the access to requests per country which is not possible.

      Do you have any product roadmap that could help us?

      Thanks,

      Velan

      Author's profile photo Ashwin Katkar
      Ashwin Katkar

      Does this works with ECC or required S/4 only. I couldn't find the answer in the given documentation.

       

      Thanks,

      Ashwin