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Use

SAP Business Workflow (WebFlow Engine) makes it easy to define business processes that are not yet mapped in the SAP system. These may be simple release or approval procedures, or more complex business processes such as creating a material master and the associated coordination of the departments involved. SAP Business Workflow is particularly suitable for situations in which work processes have to be run through repeatedly, or situations in which the business process requires the involvement of a large number of agents in a specific sequence.

You can also use SAP Business Workflow to respond to errors and exceptions in other, existing business processes. You can start a workflow when predefined events occur, for example an event can be triggered if particular errors are found during an automatic check.

SAP provides several workflows that map predefined business processes. These workflows do not require much implementation effort. For an overview of these SAP workflows for mySAP Technology, see Workflow Scenarios and the documentation for the application component.

Integration

SAP Business Workflow uses the existing transactions and functions of the SAP system and does not change these functions. You can use SAP Business Workflow to combine the existing functions of the SAP system to form new business processes. The workflow system controls the business processes. If you are already using Organizational Management, you can use the organizational structure created there to have the relevant agents carry out the individual activities. It is possible to have an activity carried out by a position. This ensures that the respective occupiers of the position can carry out the individual activities during execution of the workflow. This means that personnel changes in your organization are taken into account immediately in the execution of a workflow.

SAP Business Workflow is also integrated with cross-component SAP Business Process Management (BPM) in Exchange Infrastructure (XI). A workflow can send messages to a business process and, conversely, messages from a business process can be processed in a workflow.

Features

SAP Business Workflow provides a number of tools for defining and analyzing workflows as well as for monitoring operation.

The Workflow Builder is for displaying and making changes to workflows. You can make minor extensions, such as carrying out your own agent assignments or changing deadline monitoring, to the original workflows supplied by SAP and save these as a Workflow Configuration.

The WebFlow Function enables you to extend workflows beyond company boundaries. The required data can be sent as XML documents. SAP Business Workflow can also react to suitable incoming XML documents.

There are various Workflow Wizards for defining workflows and creating specific parts of a workflow. You can start the existing Workflow Wizards from the Workflow Builder.

To make the functions of the SAP System available to the workflow, use the business object type. You can define and analyze business object types in the Business Object Builder. The workflow accesses the individual business objects at runtime using the reusable tasks. The Business Workflow Explorer gives you an overview of all existing tasks.

If you are the end user, you receive information about the activities you need to perform in your Business Workplace, in the Workflow Inbox MiniApp, or in the iView Universal Worklist of the Enterprise Portal. An iView is available within portals. This provides you with a central overview of all the activities that you are authorized to carry out. You can start the activities from here.

Workflow system administrators have various tools at their disposal, which they can use to control and analyze the current workflows. The workflow system administrator is notified about problems automatically by the system.