Substitutes for Workflows 

Use

SAP Business Workflow implements a substitution arrangement to deal with a user's duties in their absence.

Prerequisites

The automatic appearance of work items in the substitute's worklist is dependent on a setting in the PD system table. It is possible to define which objects can be entered as position-related substitutes in Administration of Organizational Management.

Features

Who is involved?

Substitution always involves two users:

The substitute can process "foreign" work items for the duration of the substitution. It is irrelevant whether they are assigned to the underlying single-step tasks as a possible agent.

How does substitution work?

Substitution works in two ways:

  1. User A adopts substitution for user B and for the duration of the substitution sees only the work items seen previously by B in their workflow inbox.

    2. User B must have entered user A as their substitute for a particular period without activating the substitution. During this period, A can adopt substitution for B at any time without having to confer with B.

    Instead of their own worklist, user A is displayed user B's worklist. B's name is in the column Substitution for in the worklist, as long as this column is included in the current configuration of B's Business Workplace.

  2. User A automatically sees not only the work items previously seen by employee B, but also their own work items in their Business Workplace. This also applies to all work items generated for B in the future ("automatic forwarding").

User B must enter user A as substitute and activate the substitution. No further action on the part of user A is required for this kind of substitution.

A can continue working as usual. They see a Business Workplace to which B's work items are added dynamically. A can recognize these work items by the fact that B's name is in the column Substitution for, as long as this column is included in the current configuration.

In both cases, user A can perform operations on these "foreign" work items within the scope of the substitute profile assigned to them by B. It is irrelevant whether A is assigned to the underlying single-step tasks as a possible agent.

User B can continue working without any restrictions in both cases.

Activities

You can access substitute maintenance in the Business Workplace by choosing Settings ® Workflow settings. For information on the individual functions, refer to Maintaining and Activating Substitutes