External Process Integration

Integrate external workflows with Business Planning and Consolidation business process flows.

Complicated planning processes may exist where data flows among different organizations and departments and requires multiple levels of approvals, counter-signatures, and so on. To help accommodate this, you can integrate business process flows with workflows that are outside of Business Planning and Consolidation.

Overall Process

  1. The process owner and the business user define the planning process. Then, the process owner defines the BPF template as a main planning process within BPC and defines the activities that need approval.

  2. The process owner maintains the approval workflow in an external workflow system, for example, the office automation system (OA). Meanwhile, all workflow processes are registered in the BPC BPF automatically (if there is an API to load the workflow process from the OA system) or manually. The user maintains all necessary parameters such as server and URL in the BPC BPF.

  3. For each activity that needs an external approval workflow, the process owner assigns the corresponding approval workflow process. The process can be different for different driving dimensions and contexts.

  4. The user assigns the external workflow to a deployed BPF template. If a new template version is created, the mapping of the old version is not inherited automatically. When the user selects the template, no mapping is shown. The user can check the process mapping of the previous template version and can copy the mappings to the new template version.

    Note
    Creating two mapping entries with the same context, activity, and driving dimension member is not permitted. You can create an entry for all driving dimension members, however. If another entry exists for specific driving dimension members with the same context and activity, the system uses this specific entry at runtime.