Business Workflow Innovations in SAP S/4 HANA

A technology-based business revolution is currently taking place around the world that, at first sight, knows no boundaries. At very high speeds and in very large quantities, people and companies are being connected in new, innovative and groundbreaking ways. This revolution is also called Digital Transformation (DT). If we look at this from the SAP user's point of view, we can translate this into the following:

This digital transformation places different demands on our IT infrastructure and therefore on the SAP landscape. The arrival of SAP S/4 HANA makes many innovations possible. Important preconditions for success are flexibility and simplicity. SAP S/4 HANA is therefore the next generation business suite for this digital world.

SAP Business Workflow has been the standard tool for many years for automating procedures and optimizing business processes within the SAP Business Suite. This also applies to S/4HANA. The team responsible for the workflow environment has made several changes to the workflow runtime and development environment to better respond to new needs. For example, innovations have been implemented in the areas of process design, task execution and the supported workflow engine. Everything revolves around simplicity and flexibility.

Fiori My Inbox

The central place of the mobile SAP Fiori platform where users can perform workflow related tasks is the Fiori Launchpad. The first Fiori apps made available by SAP were task-based. This meant that a user could choose from various apps to give different approvals. For a complete picture of the outstanding work, this approach is not optimal. Various apps had to be checked in order to perform all the work.

SAP has therefore introduced the Fiori My Inbox app. This is a central, uniform inbox where tasks from various systems (SAP and non-SAP) and various processes come together and where standard SAP Workflow tasks as well as customer specific tasks are clearly presented.

Important features of this renewed Fiori app:

choice between standard view or expert list view;
full-text search, grouping, sorting and filtering;
easy to maintain, plan and unplanned substitutions across multiple systems;
mass approval;
supports Business Workflow and BPM;
API for connection non-SAP system;
fully responsive for all devices;
works on Premise and in the Cloud;
Possibilities to add company/process data to tasks;
dynamic columns.

Workflow Push Notifications

A new way to notify users about new tasks are the workflow Push Notifications. These are sent from the Fiori 2.0 notification center. Without the user going to the My Inbox app, new tasks quickly appear. These tasks can also be handled directly without having to open them. It is a powerful solution that can be configured per workflow. So you have the choice to enable them for all workflow processes or only for the time-critical ones.

Important features:

take action directly from the notification or open the notification / task to see more detailed information
only 1 mouse click needed to open the task in the My Inbox app
configurable per workflow process
configurable texts and buttons
transaction: SWF_PUSH_NOTIF1

Manage Workflows

Designing workflow processes using SAP Business Workflow was, due to the complexity of tooling to date, usually reserved for experienced developers. A common desire of companies and organizations was to make the design of simple procedures more user friendly. The Fiori application 'Manage Workflows' will support this.

Without any knowledge of a programming language, someone can quickly set up a procedure with various activities in a user-friendly Fiori environment. This environment also reduces the chance of design errors by offering a limited set of options. However, these options are so sufficient that a complete procedure can be set up simply, quickly and flexibly.

Important features:

overview in which available and active procedures can be requested ;
ability to activate and deactivate procedures;
setting up and changing starting conditions;
Adding, modifying or deleting process steps;
setting up task allocation;
capture exceptions.

Workflow Engine

The workflow engine, which ensures that workflow procedures are started and handled, is also taken care of at various points. Most improvements are planned but not (fully) available at the time of writing.

Business processes are never static, an organization is never static. Therefore, we often see that procedures change over time and even have to change for already running procedures. Among other things, it becomes possible to change these ongoing workflow procedures by adding and removing steps, enforcing comments or changing the agent allocation. It will then no longer be necessary to stop the current procedure and go through the renewed process again from the start. In addition, it will not be necessary to model every exception in the model. Because a current procedure can be modified at any time, this simplifies the maintainability of the underlying workflow model. This does not have to include all exceptions and scenarios: a significant reduction in complexity. When archiving, not only the collected process data, but also the specific process definition is stored so that everything can be easily analyzed afterwards.

Another addition is configuring mandatory steps via workflow rules. This makes it possible to enforce that certain steps in a procedure must always have been performed. This can be changed dynamically and easily without affecting the modelled process.

Workflow analytics

The necessary steps are also being taken in the field of analysis. Fully in line with the Fiori concept, tools will be made available to monitor workflow procedures. This will enable users to quickly track down problem situations and take relevant action.

For questions or additional information on this subject, please contact Sander van der Wijngaart.