BPM approvals

[Dart, Jocelyn]

Hi Karl,
At the moment these are the major approaches for agent assignment in BPM:


a)      Use UME/Portal user groups/roles/user ids directly (actually groups are really useful for identifying teams of people)

b)      Calculate the agents using a BRM rule (e.g. using a decision table) and return as a (list of ) UME/Portal user group/role/user id(s)

c)       Call a web service to calculate the agents and return as a (list of) UME/Portal user group/role/user id(s)


There are mapping functions pre-provided to e.g. convert a regular unique user id to a UME/Portal user id equivalent.

There's no direction connection to the backend org chart... not a big deal for finding the original agents, but means you need to think about forwarding/substitution a little harder for long-running scenarios.

Hope that helps.
Regards,
Jocelyn

From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of Karl Nietz
Sent: Friday, 7 May 2010 4:49 PM
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: BPM approvals


Hi,

Further to Jocelyn's response below, is there any documentation or a blog that explains how BPM actually supplants workflow for simple processess such as PO approval, as indicated?  I've checked the ES simple sample applications and the purchase requisition approval example seems to gloss over the issue, or at least appears to be using an underlying workflow template for steps such as agent assignment.  Or is this the whole thrust of the BPM/workflow relationship?  A chap called Kenichi has a 1hour podcast on SDN but the screens are unreadable.  Anything to get me started would be helpful.

 Karl

----- Forwarded by Karl Nietz/AUS/CSC on 06/05/2010 01:49 PM -----
From:

"Dart, Jocelyn" <jocelyn.dart at sap.com<mailto:jocelyn.dart at sap.com>>

To:

"SAP Workflow Users' Group" <sap-wug at mit.edu<mailto:sap-wug at mit.edu>>

Date:

06/05/2010 01:18 PM

Subject:

RE: This Group




________________________________



Hi Mike,
Just adding the SAP employee perspective... and by the way I'm Product Lead for NW BPM in ANZ Field Services this year.

I agree currently NW BPM and Workflow should be considered as complementary.  Mainly due to existing business content and solution maturity issues.   Also yes Workflow will not be going away anytime soon.
It is however possible to use NW BPM instead of Workflow for a new site that does not use workflow at all for scenarios that we would previously have done in workflow (e.g. purchase order approval) - provided current limitations/restrictions are understood and this is happening at some sites.

A lot of the concepts and issues around process handling are the same.
We currently have a BPM forum in SDN, so the question for this forum is: as BPM usage grows do you want to start covering that area as well or just stick with traditional workflow?

I can't give any official details on future releases yet but I can confirm generally that we are expecting some better integration options between workflow and NW BPM when we get to 7.3 on both the backend and NW BPM platforms most likely around business event management and calling of ABAP-based applications.   We also expect some sort of import for 7.3 although I don't expect we will be translating from workflow to BPM or vice versa - more likely import of a model from business process modelling applications.  I don't expect workflow to be further developed - although I agree BPMN is easier to work with and enables better cross communication between business and IT.

If anyone has any specific questions I'm happy to provide what information I can.  There are trial versions available on SDN if you want to have a play with NW BPM, or try out the pre-built Simple Sample Applications on the ESWorkplace site.

Regards,
Jocelyn
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