Guided Procedures and Workflow

[jerry.martinek]

Hi Mikko,

Thank you for your reply. 

Rightly or wrongly, my goal is for the business is to realize that modifying
the WDs or using GP isn't going to solve the immediate problem which is the
lack of time to complete the development stage. The other problem or
challenge is complicated business requirements that don't map to standard
functionality. New technology that we don't understand isn't going to solve
our diminishing development window, complex business issues and finally
ramp-up related issues.

I may be back for additional help/information.

Regards,
Jerry    

-----Original Message-----
From: sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu [mailto:sap-wug-bounces at mit.edu] On Behalf Of
Mikko Mäki-Rahkola
Sent: June 8, 2006 11:39 PM
To: sap-wug at mit.edu
Subject: Re: Guided Procedures and Workflow

Hi Jerry,

Alan will probably give you a more 'official' view on GP himself but
here are my comments...

First, I didn't quite understand one of the requirements you stated.
What did you mean by travel request itemization? Do you have a
requirement to split up the travel request advance amount?

Writing the travel doc entry applications from scratch is I think a
huge task, not only do you need to get all the view logic there but
also connect to the backend to get help values, transfer the data etc.
So I think the business case might not be that good counting in the
maintenance cost in addition to the development cost.

Couldn't you just modify the current travel request/expense report Web
Dynpro apps directly and then use them as is? SAP delivers the source
code for these so putting in some logic of your own (like attachment
entry or itemization) shouldn't take that long from a skilled WD
developer.

In my current project we have implemented Web Dynpro-enabled travel
request and expense report approval workflows (running on ECC5.0 &
EP6.0). We have had some smaller changes done to the entry
applications and created a custom approval/checking application (I
believe ECC6.0 has a standard app for this), too. All this works well
together, workflow as the backbone glueing all the WD pieces into a
fully web-enabled workflow.

Regarding Guided Procedures, I think you can't directly include the
standard travel WD apps there because of missing WD interfaces. Using
GP would thus basically require you to develop your own GP-supported
Web Dynpro application or a plain form, which brings me back to the
business case point I raised at first. SAP's view on GP's usage also
seems to be against this, I believe they recommend GP only for
departmental processes, not company-wide like a travel request or
expense report approval process.

So in conclusion, I believe GP might not be the best choice here. You
have quite a lot of existing functionality exposed as Web Dynpros
which you can use by doing small modifications and tying them up with
workflow. The other GP way would require a lot of SAP standard
overwriting and would leave you out on your own regarding support.

If you are interested in our project details, please contact me
directly and I'll be happy to share any helpful information.

Best regards,
Mikko
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