Many new features and innovations have been developed within the SAP Workflow Management product in the last couple of months. Not all of them are immediately visible to the user but these functions will, of course, contribute to our goal of constantly increasing the overall customer satisfaction and are aligned with our holistic strategy. But let’s start with a little bit of background before emphasizing some of the highlights.
Already mid of last year we have combined all of our famous services (Workflow, Decisions, Process Visibility & Flexibility, Inbox) to a complete cloud offering for supporting the digital transformation journey of organizations. The need for integrating digital technology into all areas of a business was always important but pushed to a top priority by the well-known effects of the global pandemic. It became obvious that all areas of our life are affected, and we need to quickly adopt digital processes e.g., click&collect offerings to support the local economy, vaccination appointments or even digital learning platforms for home schooling.
The same mechanics also happened within companies. The need for speed to establish digital business processes is huge. This fact directly leads to the momentum of enabling business technologists (business experts but non-developers) to create or configure process flows without the need of costly IT implementation projects.
The key to success is to offer the best experience for the respective user combined with a powerful and complete feature set.
Let us now talk about the new features we delivered over the last couple of weeks and months.
You can now translate workflows and enable end users to see their tasks in their preferred language within the My Inbox application, the Monitor Workflow application, and in the REST APIs by providing the HTTP header Accept-Language (help). This is realized via a special resource bundle file as part of your workflow project in SAP Business Application Studio.
When you are using the Fiori Launchpad service on Cloud Foundry environment, it is now possible to create Monitor Workflows, My Inbox, and Start Form tiles with the standard SAP Fiori launchpad functionalities (help).
In my eyes a real wow-feature is the introduction of a referenced subflow inside a main workflow within the Workflow Editor. The subflow is an external workflow definition that can be reused and is deployed independently from the main workflow. The biggest benefits are:
Sounds like a small improvement but was heavily requested. As a user you can now copy an existing rule and just to modifications instead of creating a new rule and repeat many similar steps in Manage Rule Projects application.
We heard your feedback and created a really nice, guided configuration experience (named Booster) to setup our product on Business Technology Platform (BTP). This is quite easy and saves you a lot of time. Try it out!
I want to point-out the first Live Process content package using an SAP AI Business Service. The document extraction service returns the extraction results from header fields and line items, after you have uploaded a document file to the service.
As part of the content package, the receiver of the invoice needs to upload the pdf file of the vendor invoice. Relevant data gets extracted and it is possible to automatically process invoices while making sure that these invoices and payables match.
We will continue to deliver high value features for all of our services. According to our mission it is clear that our focus areas are:
It is going to be an exciting year for the business process segment, for sure. Many cool things are in the pipeline - stay tuned.
One product
Already mid of last year we have combined all of our famous services (Workflow, Decisions, Process Visibility & Flexibility, Inbox) to a complete cloud offering for supporting the digital transformation journey of organizations. The need for integrating digital technology into all areas of a business was always important but pushed to a top priority by the well-known effects of the global pandemic. It became obvious that all areas of our life are affected, and we need to quickly adopt digital processes e.g., click&collect offerings to support the local economy, vaccination appointments or even digital learning platforms for home schooling.
The same mechanics also happened within companies. The need for speed to establish digital business processes is huge. This fact directly leads to the momentum of enabling business technologists (business experts but non-developers) to create or configure process flows without the need of costly IT implementation projects.
The key to success is to offer the best experience for the respective user combined with a powerful and complete feature set.
Highlights of the past months
Let us now talk about the new features we delivered over the last couple of weeks and months.
Workflow translation
You can now translate workflows and enable end users to see their tasks in their preferred language within the My Inbox application, the Monitor Workflow application, and in the REST APIs by providing the HTTP header Accept-Language (help). This is realized via a special resource bundle file as part of your workflow project in SAP Business Application Studio.
Workflow translation
SAP Fiori Launchpad support
When you are using the Fiori Launchpad service on Cloud Foundry environment, it is now possible to create Monitor Workflows, My Inbox, and Start Form tiles with the standard SAP Fiori launchpad functionalities (help).
Site Manager - Fiori Launchpad
Referenced subflows (Blog)
In my eyes a real wow-feature is the introduction of a referenced subflow inside a main workflow within the Workflow Editor. The subflow is an external workflow definition that can be reused and is deployed independently from the main workflow. The biggest benefits are:
- Reusability and reduced development time
- Consistency and increased maintainability by making the graphical view more readable & simple
- Flexibility to create a subflow to a specific context
Referenced subflows in workflow editor
Copy a rule
Sounds like a small improvement but was heavily requested. As a user you can now copy an existing rule and just to modifications instead of creating a new rule and repeat many similar steps in Manage Rule Projects application.
SAP Workflow Management setup via Booster (Blog)
We heard your feedback and created a really nice, guided configuration experience (named Booster) to setup our product on Business Technology Platform (BTP). This is quite easy and saves you a lot of time. Try it out!
Invoices without Purchase Order - Live Process package
I want to point-out the first Live Process content package using an SAP AI Business Service. The document extraction service returns the extraction results from header fields and line items, after you have uploaded a document file to the service.
As part of the content package, the receiver of the invoice needs to upload the pdf file of the vendor invoice. Relevant data gets extracted and it is possible to automatically process invoices while making sure that these invoices and payables match.
Upcoming
We will continue to deliver high value features for all of our services. According to our mission it is clear that our focus areas are:
- Enhance the support for the business technologist (Low Code / No Code workflow)
- Enrich the functions and features of our core services
- Build more predefined content packages to accelerate digitalisation
It is going to be an exciting year for the business process segment, for sure. Many cool things are in the pipeline - stay tuned.
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