Top tips for managing SAP business workflow, root cause analysis, administration tools and future trends include intelligent business operations.

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SAP Business Workflow
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SAP Business Workflow provides significant opportunities to help organisations perform more
efficiently — we offer this guide to help companies get the most value from their SAP
investment.
SAP Workflow adds values to bottom line through:
• Improve productivity, traceability and reduce rework
• Ensure consistency of business activities
• Reduce queue and cycle times for processes
• Provide metrics (baseline) for continuous improvement
Note: SAP Workflow can be implemented without any additional licencing or installations.
This guide contains:
• Recommendations for how to manage SAP Workflow efficiently
• Techniques to identify root causes of SAP Workflow Errors
• Overview of the standard reporting tools
• Future trends to maximise your workflow solutions
Contents

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We have encountered a number of clients where the Workflow set up is sub-optimal.
There are a number of elements to consider:
• Basis configuration using transaction SWU3 — here the setup here must be completed and
correctly setup before transporting workflow solutions across your landscape — incorrectly
configured destinations, number ranges and user settings will cause you headaches.
• Runtime configuration using transaction SWPA — should be set up to ensure that data
limits, buffering and log setup is configured correctly.
• Error Handling and Event Queue using transaction SWEQADM — in production ideally you
should be using a queue for event delivery and change the default behaviour of error handling
Make sure you are aware of your buffering settings for workflow, so that when any changes
are made, buffering and shared memory can be refreshed accordingly.
Master data is one of the most common causes of workflow errors, ensure that the
dependencies are noted so that changes and their impacts can be handled effectively.
Ensure you archive completed work items to keep work flow table sizes optimal.
Recommendation 1: Tune your workflow Engine
Workflow Recommendations

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Workflow Recommendations
To ensure that your system runs efficiently, we recommend appointing a technology savvy
workflow champion — who is responsible for workflow support and pro-active error
identification. One of the main challenges is ensuring that the master data is up to date and
that incorrectly routed work items are allocated to correct processors (called Agents in SAP
Workflow terminology)
Your champion would:
• check that the underlying core configuration and infrastructure is set up correctly.
• have a good knowledge of the configured business processes and help to iterate and
improve the workflow design to ensure optimal processing times.
Companies tend to make ABAP programmers or the Basis team responsible for workflow
administration, in our experience this relegates it to a technical function and does not provide
business improvements associated with Workflow.
Recommendation 2: Appoint a Workflow Champion

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Workflow Recommendations
Business workflow should be used when your employees need to make an informed business
decision and have all the relevant information at hand — implementing notification and non-
value adding steps in workflow is a sure-fire way to reduce perceived value of the solution.
E.g. Using Workflow for email notifications, just clogs up the inbox and frustrates users.
The following checklist should be used to determine if a process is good candidate for
workflow:
• Is the process time critical, and requires user decision
• Are there legal or audit requirements associated with a specific step
• Is the process repeatable and composed of a set of sub-steps across various SAP
transactions?
Recommendation 3: Implement relevant workflow processes

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Root Cause Analysis
Unfortunately, things will go wrong in your productive workflow system — knowing how to
identify the cause and implement associated remedial actions — will give your business users
confidence that the workflow system is supporting them efficiently. The most common issues
are workflows ‘hanging’ or not started correctly.
The top techniques for find errors:
• Create a list of all your active workflow templates in production, knowing the template
name (they start with a ‘WS’) will help you narrow your search when doing root cause analysis.
• Use transaction SWUD to run the workflow diagnoses (use the workflow template you
identified in step above for filtering scenarios).
• If you are using event queues in production (which is recommended for performance and
restart reasons) — check the status of the workflow event queue when looking for issues
relating to your work items.
• Use transaction SWI2_ADM to identify work items that do not have agents
Once you identify what the specific issue is, use the workflow administrator transaction (SWIA)
to rectify the issues or fix the underlying business objects and restart the workflow.

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Common Reports
A workflow champion will likely need to assist with process specific queries — typically
around the status of individual workflows. Here is a list of recommended reports to use:
• The administrator dashboard (transaction SWF_GMP) is the recommended daily tool for
your workflow administrator and gives an overview of the current workflow environment,
shows the number of active steps, errors and provides access to tools to address the specific
issues.
• Work flow frequency report (transaction SWI2_FREQ) allows you to see how many
workflows were started for a specific template or task. It is then possible to view the workflow
log and delve into specific details for resolution. This is especially useful when you don’t have
any information on the specific work item ID and only some business information e.g. purchase
order 45092392822
• If you know the workflow item it is possible to select it via the work item selection report
(transaction SWI1)

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Key Trends
SAP Workflow is a powerful tool, SAP are actively developing extensions and improved user
experiences and intelligent reports to help improve business operations. We recommend
tracking the following trends to continue to gain value from SAP Business Workflow:
• SAP Fiori is SAPs strategic UI direction, SAP has released the SAP Fiori My Inbox which can
surface work items and notification for the underlying SAP Business Workflows. Your end
users are able to get a mobile view of their business tasks.
• SAP have released a solution called Operation Process Intelligence (OPI), which leverages
the power of the HANA database and provides business scenario management in conjunction
with SAP
• The underlying event system used by SAP Business Workflow can also be used for
correlating processing and providing an event stream to broader applications and solutions -
the SAP Process Observer is a built in solution which can provide intelligence to downstream
processes and tools. When combined with IoT solutions it can provide additional insight.

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Company Contact
Agile Business Technology (Pty) Ltd
Unit 1a, Tokai on Main Office Park, Main Road, Tokai, 7945, South Africa
Tel: 021-808-1805
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Warren Eiserman
Solution Architect