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 Entering Responsibilities (Workflow Connection)

Purpose

Many areas of a company's organization are often involved in the planning and execution of maintenance tasks. The SAP Business Workflow enables these cross-functional processes to be controlled and processed automatically.

Using this tool, you can coordinate the persons involved, the steps necessary and the data to be processed in such a way that lead times and business process costs are optimized, and the quality and the transparency of processing are enhanced.

A detailed description of SAP Workflow Management can be found under SAP Business Workflow.

Process Flow

Maintenance notifications also play an important part within the framework of this Workflow connection. If SAP Business Workflow Management is active in your company, responsibilities and time frames are defined for particular business processes. When a certain event occurs, for example, when a maintenance notification is created, the system automatically informs the responsible company areas or persons and provides ready-defined steps.

The Plant Maintenance (PM) application component offers a workflow model, that represents the business process according to the following steps:

  • Processing maintenance notifications

  • Performing tasks

  • Completing maintenance notifications

The workflow model represents the following scenario:

When a maintenance notification is created and SAP Business Workflow Management is active, the system recognizes the event "created" (= notification created) by means of status management. This event starts the workflow. For the task "Process notification", the system searches for possible responsible areas or persons and sends a work item to their inbox. A processor can display who received the notification as a work item (menu Start of the navigation path Environment Next navigation step Object links End of the navigation path ) in the notification. As soon as one of the responsible persons has started processing the notification, the work items are deleted from the inboxes of the other responsible persons.

A workflow is then put in process for the processing of tasks. Once these tasks are completed, the relevant work items are deleted from the inbox. When all tasks are completed, the notification is assigned the status "all tasks completed". The event "all tasks completed" is then created. This event starts the workflow "complete notification".

The business object types available in the standard system are described online. Select Start of the navigation path Tools Next navigation step Business Workflow Next navigation step Development End of the navigation path , and then Start of the navigation path Definition tools Next navigation step Object repository. End of the navigation path The business objects are under Plant Maintenance - Maintenance Order Management - Maintenance Notifications. You can obtain information on an object by clicking on it twice. BUS2038 refers to notifications while QMSM refers to tasks.