Hide approver steps from EBP workflow

[Daniel Lago]

Hello,
 
Some time ago I  was in a client with a problem caused by the use of
multiple WFs :
 
They had an EBP 3.0 and a lot of approval workflows for their shopping
carts. I remember that were more than 70 WF Templates. And in the next
months they were planning to extend the scope to several countries, what
means to multiply the number of approval ciscuits by 3.
 
Obviously, managing tens or perhaps hundreds of WF templates with start
conditions would have been almost impossible so we found a solution
creating a "dinamic" WF.
 
Basically, we made a WF with a 4 steps:
 
First step: Get the approval circuit related to the conditions of the
shopping cart.
Loop ( as times as defined in the appoval circuit or when the approval
task ends with rejection)
    Second step: Get the approver list for the circuit selected in the
previous step.
    Third step: Approval task
EndlLoop
Last step: Task to finally approve/reject the shopping cart.
 
With this design we replaced   71 existent WF templates by 7 ( and no
more in the future ) and the maintenance was acceptable again.
 
It is true that with this solution we met several problems with the
representation of  the tasks in the logs etc. but were solved with a
little of imagination and the gain of reduce the number of WFs was much
more appreciated than the problems originated with the new design,
 
I hope this could inspire you in similar scenarios.
 
Dani
 
 
 
> twelve steps, who makes a higher bid?
>
> Your idea is clever but indeed, to have to maintain ten or even twelve
> templates is a serious drawback.
>
> I wonder if you in the course of working on the problem did ask SAP for
> the source code of the visnet.jar? Perhaps the easiest solution'd be to
> come up with a variant of it that suppresses steps without agent? Of
> course, that would leave the table untouched but that view is not used
> very often anyway.
>
> Simon
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
> "Trant, David" <David.Trant at andrew.com>
> Sent by:
> SAP Workflow <Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU>
> 21.06.2004 19:14
> Please respond to "SAP Workflow Users' Group"
>
>
>         To:     SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
>         cc:     (bcc: Simon Daehnhardt/EHV/LIGHTING/PHILIPS)
>         Subject:        Re: Hide approver steps from EBP workflow
>         Classification:
>
>
>
>
> I'm a bit late to this discussion, but to answer the original question
> (and Jocelyn's "Well firstly - TEN STEPS!!!! - my goodness!" - try
> twelve!!):
>
> We encountered the same issues, of course, and our solution was to create
> twelve, yes count them twelve workflow templates, each representing the
> number of managerial approvals required.  We based this on the business
> telling us there would be at most nine levels between the lowest level
> grunt worker and the CEO, and adding a couple to be on the safe side,
> plus
> a catch-all.  We then have start conditions the use a custom attribute to
> determine which of the twelve workflows must be selected based on the
> shopping cart amount and the requestor's place in the food chain.  This
> solution does not require modification of the applet.  Obviously, though,
> it is a maintenance nightmare and we too are anxiously awaiting the
> ability to upgrade to the next release where the BADI should make things
> much simpler.
>
> David
>
>  -----Original Message-----
>> From:   SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU]
> Sent:   Sunday, June 20, 2004 7:49 PM
> To:     SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject:        Re: Hide approver steps from EBP workflow
>
> Hi Prasad,
>
> Sounds like you need to organise for an SRM consultant to assist.
> No the workflow does not work the same way as PR release - we should not
> be a big surprise as
> shopping carts are not the same as requisitions. What is in the book for
> EBP 3.0 still holds
> true for 3.5.
>
> Jocelyn
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of
> rang
> nat
> Sent: Saturday,19 June 2004 2:52 AM
> To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Re: Hide approver steps from EBP workflow
>
>
> Jocelyn/Simon
>
> How exactly Sopping cart release works.Where can i get more help on EBP
> work flow.
> Is there any new versions of Prctical WF Book that covers EBP workflow in
> more...
>
> In R/3 we can have any no of release steps in simple template.
> and have a role defined which actully get user at that level based on PO
> data and
> release martix.
>
> Cheers
> Prasad
>
> "Dart, Jocelyn" <jocelyn.dart at sap.com> wrote:
> Hi Simon,
> Well firstly - TEN STEPS!!!! - my goodness!
> Secondly, when you next upgrade suggest you switch to the BADI workflow
> which will
> take care of this.
> Thirdly, to manipulate it in the way you want is possible but requires
> modification of BBP_PDH_WFL_PARAM_APPLET_FILL.
> Hence the introduction of the BADI workflow in SRM 3.0 (EBP 4.0).
> Jocelyn
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
>> From: SAP Workflow [mailto:Owner-SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU] On Behalf Of
> Simon Daehnhardt
> Sent: Friday,18 June 2004 12:05 AM
> To: SAP-WUG at MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject: Hide approver steps from EBP workflow
>
>
> Hi WUG,
> we have defined a ten step shopping cart approval workflow in EBP 3.5.
> But
> of course for any of our workflow instance only some of these steps have
> to be taken. Now we'd like to hide the empty steps from the approval
> preview. On recommendation of SAP we first switched the setting in the
> approval steps from "In workflow log" to "Not in log if condition
> 'Terminate work item' is true". This works fine as long as the workflow
> instance is still running but gives a misleading picture after the
> workflow is finished: You would see no approval steps at all and always
> "Result: Approved" even if teh sc was rejected.
> What we discovered is that the approval preview is realized by a Java
> applet "visnet.jar". This applet seems to take the workflow log as input
> (function module BBP_PDH_WFL_PARAM_APPLET_FILL, which in turn calls
> SWD_API_WORKFLOW_GRAPHIC_GET). When playing around with the data we saw
> that the way the log data result in a graphical preview can be influenced
> by changing the node type and the approval state. So there might be a way
> to get at a correct preview without empty steps by manipulating this log
> data.
> Has anybody got a hint?
> Thanks,
> - Simon
>
>
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