SAP Workflow Management – improve your processes n...

Stephan · ‎02-22-2021

What’s the challenge?

Processes run the world. They are almost everywhere, and they span across different functions and organizations. Good news, a lot of them are standardized, covered with business applications like SAP S/4HANA. Supporting the flow of work. But we still have these non-standard workflows, the need to extend existing business processes, create a workflow for dedicated business needs. And this is, where SAP Workflow Management comes into the game. To master the complexity of processes, transform from manual, paper-based activities to digitized workflows, improve them and increase efficiency.

Not every use case is fully covered with standard processes

What is SAP Workflow Management?

SAP Workflow Management offers strong capabilities to

Digitize workflows

Automate and extend business processes

Manage decision logic

Gain end-to-end process visibility

Configure process variants in a no-code environment and making use of a rich set of pre-defined process content

Supporting different scenarios starting from simple approvals to more complex composite workflow applications. And also tightly integrated with SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, to automate tasks and SAP Conversational AI to add a digital assistant.

SAP Workflow Management at a glance

Workflow

Within a web-based environment you can model your workflows based on industry standard BPMN2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation). Use the available artefacts to define events (e.g. start, end, intermediate message event), create tasks (user, script, mail or service tasks) and add gateways to control the process flow. To connect to other systems, either make use of the native REST-based APIs or alternatively use SAP Integration Suite as needed. Once the workflow is deployed and running, the user tasks can be accessed in the My Inbox application. Of course, there are also apps for administrators available.

Workflow Editor with BPMN-based artefacts

Business Rules

If you are dealing with processes and workflows, at a certain point in time you also need to be able to manage policies, guidelines or laws in your implementation. This can easily be done with business rules. In fact, you define your business rules independently of the workflow. Whenever you need to change the business rule, you don’t need to touch the workflow again. And even better, you can define these business rules for any application (also without workflows) and manage them centrally with direct deployment to e.g. SAP S/4HANA.

Define your policies and guidelines with business rules

Process Visibility

The workflows are up and running, business rules are included – great! Though you also want to ensure the process is behaving, from a business viewpoint, as expected. Being able to define process performance indicators, get to know about issues and identify process bottlenecks is key. You gain this end-to-end visibility on your processes in customized dashboards with the possibility to drill down into single instances, no matter whether they are running in SAP Workflow Management or other systems. A powerful addition is the possibility to define actions, e.g. to trigger an escalation email or another workflow. Be prepared, if anything goes wrong. Or even include results of a Qualtrics survey into your dashboard, to not only understand the performance, but also the experiences of the people involved.

End-to-end view and access to single instances

Process Flexibility

Within the Process Flexibility Cockpit, a no-code environment, you are able to create your own process variants, related decisions and visibility dashboards, based on pre-defined live process content packages. You can discover these packages from the included process hub, import them, configure your own variants and finally activate and deploy them. Furthermore, the cockpit provides insights into the running instances.

Define your own process variants

Live Process Content Packages

The live process content packages itself, consist of process variants (based on workflows), decisions (based on business rules) and process visibility scenarios. Available via the SAP API Business Hub you get access to several use cases, covering different industries and LoBs, e.g. Purchase Requisition Approval and Release, Visibility on Accounts Payable, Capital Expenditure Approval, Vendor Onboarding, and many more. With this pre-defined content, you will accelerate your projects tremendously. The scenarios itself are based on customer needs, experiences and input from our partner eco system to provide immediate value.

Visit the SAP API Business Hub and use the content in your projects

The benefits

While using SAP Workflow Management you empower your employees through process automation, freeing up their time to do more meaningful work – do more with less. Compliance is key – with clear responsibilities and audit trails you are able to comply with policies and regulations. And finally, be able to flexibly adapt to new requirements. Tailor the business processes to the business needs, support new business model innovations and fix broken processes for business resilience

How to start?

Well, now you ask yourself – how can I start with SAP Workflow Management?

SAP Community

Of course, you will find different blogs and technical articles in the SAP Community on our community topic page: SAP Workflow Management.

Ensure you sign up for our next SAP Community call: Automate and extend your business processes with SAP Workflow Management.

Your own Trial Landscape, Tutorials & Missions

The best way is to try it out, in your own environment.It’s quite easy, just follow the booster in this tutorial. Remark: the booster is also available for enterprise accounts.

And then it’s up to you with these hands-on exercises and tutorials:

Build a workflow from scratch

Deep-dive and new features

Discover and configure live process content

Also have a look at our missions in SAP Discovery Center.

SAP TechEd 2020

I also recommend watching our latest SAP TechEd sessions:

Digital Process Automation with SAP Workflow Management

Improve Business Process Experiences with Live Process Content Packages

Build a Digital Assistant for Your Business Processes

Integrate Experiences into Your Workflows

Innovation from SAP Allows Zookeepers to Spend More Time with the Animals

Looking forward to hear about your experiences – blog here, ask questions and start today to improve your business processes with SAP Workflow Management.