Fwd: RE: Outside-in approach to ESS and Workflow

[Susan R. Keohan]

Forwarded on behalf of Dan.Harmon at MOTOROLA.COM...
 
>Walt,
>
>Seeing that no one really bit on this one I'll give you my $0.02 worth.
>We have used multiple approaches here at Motorola.  Our ESS was
>implemented on the web without any workflow by using custom web forms,
>custom and existing BAPIs, and custom and existing function modules.
>Web forms feed the BAPIs which update R/3 and the update can raise an
>event to trigger another BAPI/web form.  Not really a workflow but
>certainly a process.  I did not work on that project but I know a few
>people that did and it was a tremendous amount of effort.  There were
>many reasons for this approach, good and bad, political and technical.
>The bottom line is that they were able to develop a very nice ESS system
>and roll it out to all of Motorola without using the ITS or workflow.
>
>The question you have to ask is it worth not only the development
>effort, but also the effort to maintain the custom stuff after you are
>done.  We developed a custom ITS interface into R/3 and I can honestly
>say that the maintenance effort is now much greater than the development
>effort.  I'm quite sure our ESS team faces the same issues, especially
>since they are about to upgrade to 4.6c.
>
>Regards,
>Dan
>|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
>| Dan Harmon                    |             Phone:    480-634-3090 |
>| R/3 Workflow Group Leader     |               Fax:    480-634-3761 |
>| Information Technology        |             Pager:    888-782-2030 |
>| Motorola SPS                  |            dan.harmon at motorola.com |
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>
>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Walt McDaniel [mailto:george.mcdaniel at eds.com]
>> Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 7:49 AM
>> To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
>> Subject: Outside-in approach to ESS and Workflow
>>
>>
>>
>> All,
>>
>> I'm interest in anyone  experiences on implementing the
>> Outside-in approach to web enabling  ESS
>> and  using
>> Workflow to support that ESS without  using ITS. In my
>> research of using Workflow on the web to
>> support this ESS roll-out I
>> have notice few Workflow Bapis and  that a lot of the SAP
>> Remote enabled  RFC that are Workflow
>> related call a lot of Dialogs (screen)
>> that would seem to make it hard to web enable Workflow
>> functionality without a lot of in-house
>> development.
>>
>> For example when trying to use the  remote enable function
>> module RFC SWW_WI_EXECUTE_NEW to
>> execute a Work item for the Workflow 'ESS Plausibility check
>> change of address'  a pop-up of
>> PA20 occurs, which I think one would not want when trying to
>> use a Remote enabled module in SAP DCOM CC or some third
>> party connector like Actional or Btalk.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Walt
>>
>>
>>
>