Setting Deadlines for Activities

Timelines, including activity deadlines, are important within a planning process.

Deadlines can be set for activity performers and activity reviewers in Process Templates and Process Instances. After specifying a deadline for an activity, process owners can easily monitor its status in the process monitor.

Defining Deadlines in Process Templates

In a BPF template, a deadline is the number of days after which an activity will expire. For example, if you enter 2 days for the deadline, the activity will be due two days after its start date.

You can also define actions upon the expiration of the activity. When choosing to wait, the activity keeps its original status and does not close automatically. When choosing to close the activity, the activity automatically closes. If you further define a different deadline or choose not to enable a deadline for the activity when creating a process instance based on the current template, the deadline you defined in the process template is replaced by the newly defined deadline in the process instance.

Defining Deadlines in Process Instances
You can adjust deadlines you defined in process templates or define new deadlines when setting timelines during the creation of a process instance. Different deadlines can be set in accordance with different start dates:

  • If you want to start the process instance immediately or on a certain date, you can check the Enable with Deadline option and choose the date of the deadline for the performer and reviewer of each activity.

  • If you want to start the process manually later, you can check the Enable with Deadline option and enter after how many days each activity will be due.

After you successfully create the process instance, the deadlines you set display in My Activities for the performer and reviewer and in Process Monitor for the process owner.
Note
You can still make changes to your planning activities and modify deadlines in Process Monitor after the process starts to run. For more information, refer to Process Monitor.

Email notification of an upcoming due date for each activity can also be automatically sent. To set the email notification, use transaction SA38 and execute program RSBPC0_DAEMON_UI to start a job. Use transaction SM37 to view the job status of job name BPC_DAEMON_JOB.