Typical BPM Workflow HOWTO on NW CE 7.1 Ehp1: Scenario 1 - Automating the workflow routing

[kenichi_unnai]

Greetings,

Welcome to my blog series! Here I would like to use my blogging opportunity to communicate with you in order to better understand and help you with practical tips of NW BPM implementation howto.

Now I am about to start a piece of howto with BPM on NetWeaver CE 7.1 Ehp1 - but these contents were originally created for the 1 hour RIG knowledge enablement workshop. The material was a tangible result of the productive discussion between SAP development, product management, product definition, and regional implementation group, based on our real-life implementation experience. For those of you who can spend 1 hour to participate in the workshop, you are more than welcome to join in the recorded session: https://sap.apj.pgiconnect.com/p94387374/ - this session discusses "10 common workflow implementation scenario".

Remark: The contents require beginner level knowledge of NW BPM on 7.1 Ehp1.

The idea of this blog which iterates what is discussed in the 1 hour recorded session is to build the groundwork for seeking additional workflow implementation scenario. I hope I can make use of this blogging space to better collect your productive ideas. I am looking forward to it.

Scenario 1:  Automating the workflow routing

Let's start with a very classic scenario - any workflow should have such requirement.

Solution:

You need to implement it by making use of

• Rules
• Services
• Exclusive Gateways
• Expressions

Rules, Services, and Expressions are a sort of service module or function which you can invoke to decide the branch condition by means of dynamic calculation. It should be pretty straightforward and you can take a look at the simple demo in the recorded session.

When it comes to work with Exclusive Gateway, you should learn little basic:

1. The condition gets evaluated from top to bottom
2. Each condition is evaluated by either True or False
3. If False, it goes to the next (or lower) alternative item
4. If it encounters Default Gate, it skips to the next one without evaluation
5. If all items are evaluated (= all items have been False), Default Gate will be chosen

 

One remark is this gateway must define one Default Gate. This helps to avoid the process deadlock.

Well that's the story for today. As I mentioned in the beginning of the blog - I would like to hear from you. Especially I am interested in "very common workflow use cases" but you don't know how to implement them with NW BPM.  We'll be in touch.