Excluded Agents

Wed Aug 1 00:39:26 EDT 2001

Hi Abdulla,
If the business is ok with it, auto-approval is fine.  I have done this
before but only after explaining the impact
to the business and getting their agreement.    Need to make sure this is
well documented somewhere also in
case your auditors question the decision later.

If you calculate first and second approvers in prior steps (e.g. by adhoc
agent assignment or by calling a method
which calls function module RH_GET_ACTORS or similar) then to auto-approve
you simply use a condition step
to check whether the actual agent of the first approval step is in the agent
list for the second approval step, then
do your auto-approval if the condition is true.  Up to you to figure out
what' s needed for auto-approval, may just
be skipping the next approval step, or may need to set additional flags/run
additional methods - depends on your
workflow.

Regards,

Jocelyn Dart
Consultant (EBP, BBP, Ecommerce, Internet Transaction Server, Workflow)
SAP Australia
Email  <mailto:jocelyn.dart at sap.com> jocelyn.dart at sap.com
Tel: +61 412 390 267
Fax: +61 2 9935 4880

-----Original Message-----
From: Abdullah Musaid [mailto:AMusaid at qatargas.com.qa]
Sent: Friday, 27 July 2001 9:44 PM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Excluded Agents

Dear Jocelyn,

We have accounted for release of payment by placing a payment block until
the work item has been approved by proper persons.  In some cases, only one
person has the authority to approve an invoice.  So, the use of the excluded
agents is not really geared towards security.  Fraud is not a concern
because all approvals are based on a Financial Authority Table that includes
levels (attesters, approvers) and amounts control mechanism.

As for your suggestions, this is how I look at it:
- Substitution should stay.  It is supported in the system and we have  more
than one workflow in the company.
- Substitution of a person outside the approval path (evaluation path) might
not be a good idea because of the local expertise/relevance in each approval
path.
- The workaround you mentioned by calculating first and second approving
persons is similar to what we do know on a monitoring basis.
- Auto-approve for same persons might be an idea.  I need to discuss it with
Business.

I was thinking of completely removing the excluded agents option from the
workflow container.  I am not exactly sure about the impact of this on.  I
did simple testing and things look OK with the removal.  However, I wanted
to hear what others might say; especially those who probably have seen
something like this.

Thanks for your reply.

Abdulla Musaid
Systems Analyst SAP FI/CO

-----Original Message-----
From: Dart, Jocelyn [mailto:jocelyn.dart at sap.com]
Sent: Friday, July 27, 2001 3:31 AM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Excluded Agents

Hi Abdulla,
Ok you have a real live segregation of duties issue, which you need to
discuss with the business.
The workflow is set up to ensure (via the excluded agent) that at least 2
DIFFERENT people approve
the release.

My guess would be that this doesn't change for your business just because
someone has been substituted - you
probably still want 2 different people to approve the release otherwise when
Person B is on vacation, Person A
can effectively release anything on his/her own - leaving the business
exposed to deliberate or accidental fraud.

If you want to handle this in your workflow you could:

* Adjust your substitutions so this doesn't happen - e.g. delegate to
another mananger at the same level rather
than to subordinates.

* Calculate the second approver in a step prior to the second approval
workitem and if the
first and second approvers are the same, either send a workitem to an
administrator or business process owner
who can dynamically pick an alternative agent,

or send the second approval workitem itself to the administrator/business
process owner who can execute the workitem on someone's behalf.

If you don't care about segregation of duties in this case you could
auto-approve the second approval step but
I wouldn't recommend that.
Regards,

Jocelyn Dart
Consultant (EBP, BBP, Ecommerce, Internet Transaction Server, Workflow)
SAP Australia
Email  <mailto:jocelyn.dart at sap.com> jocelyn.dart at sap.com
Tel: +61 412 390 267
Fax: +61 2 9935 4880

-----Original Message-----
From: Abdullah Musaid [mailto:AMusaid at qatargas.com.qa]
Sent: Thursday, 26 July 2001 10:06 PM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Excluded Agents

Hi Folks,

We have a Release for Payment WF running in the company.  The Release for
Payment task "407862" is used with Activity_EXCLUDED_AGENTS configured to
receive agents from Reference table "WFSYST" & Reference field "ACT_AGENT"
in the ABAP Dictionary.  The evaluation path (also called approval path)
consists of a multi-level WF procedure with different people at different
positions/levels.

The problem occurs when someone at a lower level approval an invoice.  This
person (say "Person A")  is also acting (substituted) for another person
("Person B") where "Person B" is on the same approval path, but at a higher
level.  After "Person A" completes the approval.  The WF takes the item to
the upper level for approval.  But, because that "Person B" is on vacation
and had substituted "Person A"; the WF will try to take the work items back
to "Person A" for approval.  This is where the work item gets stuck because
"Person A" is an excluded agent by the definition of the Release for Payment
task "407862".

The problem also occurs when "Person A" substitutes "Person B".  The WF
system knows who completed the work item and will remember not to send it to
that person again.

Running transaction "SWI1", the work item will appear with status "Ready"
and "blank" value for the Actual Agent field.  This is where we manually end
and approve the invoice using special authorization by a Basis person.

Well, I need to you what you think is a good solution for this problem.

Regards,

Abdulla Musaid
Systems Analyst SAP FI/CO

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