Agents for Deadline Processing

[Scheinoha John]

David,
 
   In Deadline monitoring, you can assign "the recipient of message
when latest end missed" based on an Org unit.  If you do the assignment
by org unit, this might be a quick solution to your problem.
 
Hope this works for you,
 
 
 
John Scheinoha
Briggs & Stratton Corporation
(414) 256 - 5136
scheinoha.john at basco.com
 
>>> David.Trant at andrew.com 11/26/03 09:32AM >>>
Can anyone confirm whether my interpretation of deadline processing
using organizational objects is correct?  We are on 4.6C and here is the
scenario:
 
Before responsibility rules were either available or understood (before
my time in workflow, anyway), we created workflow A that uses a role
with an organizational object that has plant and division as keys.  Org
unit A was created for this workflow and has everyone associated with
the process defined within that structure.  Then, another relatively
inexperienced person created workflow B based on the same design
principles.  Workflow B uses the same org object, and a different org
unit, call it B, containing the people associated with process B.  After
org unit B was populated, we started noticing sporadic deadline messages
from process A showing up in the inboxes of people associated with
process B.  Note that workflow B is not yet active; just having org unit
B populated in production is sufficient for the role resolution from A
to start finding the new people defined for B.
 
My analysis indicates that when a step in workflow A determines agents,
it applies the role to find all people (A or B) associated with a given
plant and division, and then restricts the list according to possible
agents, which has been assigned to be org unit A.  Likewise, a similar
step from workflow B would also resolve to the same list of people from
the role, but then restrict the results to just those listed in org unit
B.  This seems to work fine.
 
The problem occurs the deadline is reached for this step.  The latest
end tab has the same role defined for the recipients of the deadline
message (the process is to simply remind someone that there is work to
do rather than escalate to someone else).  At this point, the message is
going to everyone associated with that plant and division from both org
units A and B.  My guess is that SAP's mindset is that while the
original activity is intended to go to a select group of people as
defined in agent assignment, that in general it might be desirable to
send escalation messages outside that original group.  The system
therefore seems to ignore the possible agent restriction and simply send
the deadline message to everyone identified by the role resolution.  The
online help for deadline maintenance doesn't go into this level of
detail.
 
Can anyone verify whether my interpretation is correct or not?
 
Does anyone have a quick fix suggestion?  Our anticipated solution is
to convert to responsibility rules, which we've decided to do anyway
long term for these workflows, but this is likely to take a while.
 
Thanks for your help,
David
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