Workflow Deadline Monitoring Question

[Dart, Jocelyn]

David,
One question:  How quickly are you expecting your users to react?
 
Very small deadlines tend to be counter-productive.  Even if you send the
work item on straight away the user still has to notice it and process it. So what amount of effort involved in getting it there the second the deadline is exceeded instead of a couple of minutes later do you really want to spend? Especially considering the performance impact of running a job every minute on the system.
 
So try thinking about it from a pragmatic viewpoint.
If the deadline is 09:06 and the next deadline job doesn't run until 09:10 is that really a concern in a productive system? Remember workflow will still record the actual deadline exceeded time if you are trying to measure SLAs.
 
Most production deadlines are not 1 minute - they are 1-2 days or at least several hours apart.
It's only in development systems that deadlines tend to be set very small - and of course
in those systems you can usually use the administrator options to adjust the calculated deadline to
a more convenient time.
 
Furthermore if you use the as-needed approach and you have many work items with a deadline (i.e. just WITH
a deadline on them, regardless of whether the deadline has been exceeded) a job is started for EVERY single work item.
A few hundred work items can then quickly flood the batch queue!  As every deadline job is the same and checks all outstanding deadlines they can start locking each other out of the relevant tables and then you may have exceeded deadlines not even being actioned!
 
Whereas with the periodic approach you control how often the job is run.  Try thinking of deadlines as a range rather than a set time to work out the worst case scenario and therefore the maximum acceptable interval between deadline jobs.  E.g. If my deadline is work item creation + 1 day (i.e. 24 hours zero minutes zero seconds), does it matter if the deadline job doesn't run for another 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, etc.?   Of course you need to work this out based on your tightest deadline.  If you have a dealine of work item creation + 4 hours then obviously waiting another hour might not be acceptable, but waiting 15 minutes may be ok.
 
 
My two bits worth anyway.
Regards,
        Jocelyn Dart
Consultant (SRM, EBP, Workflow)
and co-author of the book
"Practical Workflow for SAP"
SAP Australia
email: jocelyn.dart at sap.com
phone: +61 412 390 267
fax:   +61 2 9935 4880
 
 
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of David E. Yung
Sent: Tuesday,2 December 2003 6:52 AM
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Workflow Deadline Monitoring Question
 
 
On this note, I have a question for the group...
 
Would you recommend (or is this the option you've made) to use periodic
deadline monitoring versus as needed.  If so, I have another question:
 
Let's say for example that you schedule the deadline monitoring to be every
5 minutes, but you have a certain workflow which sets the deadline of a work
item to be 1 minute in the future.  What happens to this item?  Does it
execute within the specified minute or does it need to wait the 5 minutes
(at the most obviously) to be executed?
 
Right now, I have gone with the as needed approach because I don't want jobs
running every minute.
 
Any opinions, recommendations etc on this matter will be greatly
appreciated.
 
Also, what period of time have you chosen for the interval of the jobs?
 
Regards
 
David Yung
 
-----Original Message-----
From: SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of
Michael Pokraka
Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 11:20
To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject: Re: Workflow Deadline Monitoring Question
 
No prob, another small bit of info I might add is that I'm on a 6.20
system at the moment and as-needed scheduling is no longer available.
Which makes sense and emphasizes that SAP see workflow as becoming
widespread and much more utilized.
 
Cheers
Mike
 
Josefek, Richard wrote:
> Mike,
> Thank you so much for your response.
> Shortly after receiving it, we implemented the change and our workflow
> processing has been working flawlessly since.
> I cannot tell you how many hours have been put into researching this
> problem over the past year. We even went so far as opening up an OSS note
> with SAP. They were no help at all.
>
> Thank you again!
>
> Rick
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU]On Behalf Of
> Michael Pokraka
> Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 7:17 AM
> To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Re: Workflow Deadline Monitoring Question
>
>
> Hi,
> Check that your monitoring is configured for periodic deadline monitoring
> (as opposed to as-needed). Non-periodic causes WI's to check and schedule
> deadline jobs. In other words, if an item is created and it sees that no
> job is scheduled before it's deadline, it will schedule it unless the
> 'periodic monitoring' is set.
> Cheers
> Mike
>
> Somewhere in the mists of time Josefek, Richardwrote:
>>> We've run into a problem that I'm hoping you can shed some light on for
>>> us.  We've had a problem occurring in our Production environment since
>>> last December, 2002.  Recently, these problems have been causing our
>>> clients a lot of work to monitor and resolve.  Here's a synopsis:
>>>
>>> We use Maestro to control Workflow deadline monitoring.  Maestro runs
>>> SWWDHEX on a schedule that our clients have requested.  We do not use
>>> SAP.  However, last December, configuration for the SAP controlling of
>>> deadline monitoring was turned on in our Production environment by an
>>> SAP consultant.  We immediately corrected the situation and turned it
>>> off.  However, this has caused a series of problems that we have yet to
>>> recover from.
>>>
>>> Individuals approving within one of two workflows were causing the
>>> SWWDHEX to instantiate in SAP (without their knowledge).  Once, this
>>> happens, it continues every 10 minutes.   One of the things we did to
>>> prevent this from happening was remove security from each individual.
>>> However, we have found this is not a good solution because every once
>>> in
>>> a while (under conditions we cannot determine) a client will receive an
>>> error message "Background job SWWDHEX cannot be scheduled (error 6)".
>>> Some of these clients will notice the error message and try to approve
>>> the document again and the second time they are successful.
>>>
>>> We are assuming that the configuration that was turned on has somehow
>>> caused this irrevocable process to begin, even though we have shut it
>>> off.  We think that somewhere in the SAP environment, there is some
>>> trigger that is causing this job to run.  (Perhaps an assumption in the
>>> code that if we are not using permanent deadline monitoring, we must be
>>> using periodic instead of checking table values?)
>>>
>>> Any assistance you can provide on what triggers there might be in SAP
>>> that would cause this to happen would be much appreciated!
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>> Rick
>>
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