Cross-System and Cross-Partner Document Flow
Purpose
The subdivision of different sections of a complete business process demands the coordination of different partners and subprocesses across companies and systems. In doing so, you attain efficient results by meeting customer needs.
To determine the degree of processing of the process, and to measure the fulfillment of contractual conditions between the partners involved, you must monitor and document the actual procedure of a concrete business process. Moreover, with regard to the business documents, the flow of the business process becomes clear. You must also be able to still determine the process flow afterwards. This is valid independently of the direction of the process flow, that is for procurement and production as well as for the fulfillment of sales orders.
The leading partner that receives the sales order must be able to easily gain information about the degree of processing of the sales order and about the partners involved, and their tasks. In this way, you can forward the individual requirements for transportation, production and shipment to both internal and external partners. At the same time, a relationship must be created between the documents and business documents that the system creates during the process so that you can clearly document the process flow.
Cross-system and cross-partner document flow is the application to manage the document flow.
A document flow collects the tasks, responsibilities, and progress of a business transaction using business documents. The objects in the flow are
existing
documents and the overall status of these. You can use the document flow to document contractual agreements and the fulfillment of these in a concrete business transaction. Once the business transaction is completed, the document flow is definitely finished.
Features
Document flow provides transparency for processes that have several partners in different systems and enables a simple overview of the complete business process. Document flow maps the relationship and course of the complete process, irrespective of the actual execution of the section in the business process.
In the case of central management, several applications, which can also be implemented in different systems, use the document flow. The cross-system and cross-partner flow concentrates all the business transaction information that is relevant for the overall process in one place.
In the case of cross-system and cross-partner document flow, you can enter documents whose data is managed by other systems (that differ to the document flow system).
In any case, you can make minimal data, that is, some of the document data, redundant in cross-system and cross-partner document flow.
Document flow contains the following functions: