In talking with clients, one of the biggest complaints that I have heard is that even though they have spent time and effort implementing SAP ERP HCM they are not seeing any gains in getting their work done. In many cases they are still using the same paper forms and approvals that they had before. Managers often cannot find the needed forms on their companies’ intranet sites. They instead email HR directly about forms or in some cases completely bypass the forms and make the request directly through email. This amounts to a lot of extra work for the HR group and results in time taken away from their normal tasks to hunt down needed forms and relay them back to the manager.

In many cases, even if the form can be completed by the manager there is not a clear understanding of where the form should go next for approval or processing. In other cases clients have told me how in the middle of a process the form is often lost or thrown away with the copious amounts of printouts and paperwork managers and groups are given throughout the course of the business day. In these cases there is no way for a manager or for HR to easily track where the process is breaking down and items are being lost.

When the form receives all the needed approvals and makes it to processing for entry into the SAP system, it still takes hours or days to get to the form and make the needed changes within SAP ERP HCM. This often leads to a lot of frustration from employees, managers, and HR in that processes that could be completed in as little as one hour are taking days, weeks, or in some cases even months. Using SAP Workflow to enhance SAP ERP HCM can offer cost savings from efficiency gains, process tracking, autonomous background processing, and flexibility.

Incorporating Workflow into SAP ERP HCM 

For many companies, incorporating SAP Workflow brings several benefits. I highlight some of them in the following sections.

Efficiency Gains   

SAP Workflow provides the framework to automate your decision steps. It takes the tasks of directing the forms to the correct next participant and moves them to the background. This allows a form to be moved to the next participant in seconds whereas it might have previously taken hours or days. Now, instead of participants having to worry about the process flow, they can focus solely on the form and providing their appropriate input. Since the work items stay in a user’s business workplace until action is taken to complete that item, the tasks cannot be lost or discarded. Within SAP Workflow it is also possible to add email notifications. Emails can be sent to the next participant group notifying them of items that require their input, or in the event of a rejection, to the originating person. In the case of absent or tardy participants, email reminders and escalations go to upper management or HR. Coupled with interactive forms either on the self-service portal or within the enterprise back end, you can speed up business processes to the point where they can be completed as if all the approvers were sitting in the same room in a row and the form was simply passed down the line.  

Process Tracking

You can ease the production of audits of a business process and provide one-off tracking of individual instances of the process. Initiating participants often wonder if their form has been processed and if not, then with whom the process is sitting. In this case the framework provides a significant amount of data for every step in the process including where the current work item is waiting for action, the time each previous item has taken to complete, and the results and agent of those steps. SAP provides a number of standard reports and programs for tracking workflow, but you can also develop custom reports and end-user transactions to track the progress of the workflow. Taking these results on a macro level also allows a business to provide metrics and systemic audits on the business processes.

Autonomous Background Processing

The place where you can see some of the biggest gains in using SAP Workflow with a business process is in autonomous background processing. This happens throughout the workflow. For example, you can link a change in user data such as an address or national tax withholding information. These changes might occur from an HR administrator but they often result from employees changing the data themselves through a self-service transaction. These changes might affect other data, such as a change in state or regional taxes or the need for a user to be enrolled in a different health plan. SAP Workflow can evaluate those changes.

Depending on the rules developed for your company, the SAP Workflow can decide if this change requires an HR user to review the changes. If it does, SAP Workflow can send the user either an email or a work item. Instead of every change having to be reviewed, SAP Workflow can reduce the workload significantly. Background evaluations occur at the conclusion of most user dialog steps, including processing to see who the next approver is, whether extra notifications should be sent out, if a parallel approval flow needs to start, or if steps can be added or eliminated due to the nature of the change. An HR example of this is an employee’s change in pay. The process might be defined so that it requires three levels of approval, but if the change in pay is less than a three percent increase and no previous pay changes have occurred in the last six months, then only one level of approval is needed. At the end of a workflow there is often a large data entry step that can take a lot of time to complete when done manually. However, since the form data fields are usually static and the process is known, then SAP Workflow can add a processing step to enter the change directly into the system. Unless an error occurs, a human participant never has to enter the change, freeing up time that would otherwise be spent on data entry or needless approval steps.

High Degree of Flexibility

SAP Workflow provides your processes with a high degree of flexibility. Based on the inputs and outputs from the different participants you can shorten or lengthen the workflow depending on how the rules are devised. It’s possible to have a form return to an initiator for further input or explanation and either restart the process or return to the previous participant who required the extra information. SAP Workflow has the ability to add email notifications and work item escalation both on the individual dialog item and on the overall workflow. In using deadline monitoring you have the option for the countdown timer to work off the time of creation of the individual step, or you could have a timer based on the entire process instead of just the step. Say a business process such as a termination is an emergency process and must be completed in 24 hours. If the process has not been completed in 23 hours, for example, then it is escalated to the vice president of HR, who has the authority to make any final changes and approvals. Although for most processes very little configuration and customization are needed to implement your business processes, at any point SAP Workflow allows you to customize your more complex business processes.

Pros and Cons of Workflow

The pros and cons of using SAP Workflow vary greatly for each organization. A few points apply almost universally.

Pros

Process tracking and efficiency gains are two obvious pros that are the direct result of using SAP Workflow. The middle man is eliminated so that traditional paper pushers are replaced with automated technology, and only those individuals who need to be involved are involved. There is no need to fill out a form by hand only to have it input into a system by a data entry person. Human error is reduced as the process initiator directly inputs the information (for example, an employee address change). The standardization of processes results in clearly defined steps for carrying out a process. Paper and photocopy costs are reduced.   

Cons

Some users may equate the standardization of business processes to a lesser level of service being provided. You are, in some instances, removing the human interaction piece of the process. You are also standardizing processes that many HR generalists used to customize to meet the needs of individual employees. While this may take some getting used to at first, in the long run I have found my clients do not usually regret the change.

Another item to consider is the change management aspect that needs to occur. Users must be trained or provided with information on using the new medium to submit HR-related requests. Finally, some highly particular processes that do not fit into any of the SAP standard-provided workflows may require custom workflows. This may add to the overall time line and budget of the project. You also must establish and maintain organizational information for the routing of a workflow to happen correctly. Many SAP installations have not implemented full organizational management solutions upon first go-live.

Good Candidates for Workflow Automation

A business process that provides for an easy and beneficial transition to SAP Workflow is one that already is or can clearly be defined. The rules that determine that next participant from start to end are not ambiguous. Since SAP Workflow in most cases requires a degree of customization, then it makes sense to choose the processes that the business uses often. A process that is used 200 to 300 times a year is going to be more worthwhile to implement than a process that is used one to five times a year. In addition, because of the ability for SAP Workflow to draw upon the organizational structure, any process that follows the organization is a good candidate for SAP Workflow. The last characteristic would be to choose processes for which SAP Workflow can provide a savings in cost and efficiency, such as data processing, notifications, and escalations.

Example Workflow Process

The single approval workflow is used to automate many business processes (Figure 1). 

Figure 1

Approval workflow diagram for personnel change request imaged in SAP Workflow Builder

The workflow begins when an event from an outside application initiates the workflow. The workflow then branches. One branch creates a step that is listening for a deletion event while another branch enters into a loop waiting for a successful completion of the action. In this case it calls a subworkflow that handles the approval process. After the action is completed the next step checks the status result from the action and takes the appropriate path, such as approved, rejected, or closed. If approved, the workflow updates the system for any notifications that need to be sent out and then triggers a step to process the request into the system. The workflow then completes closing any outstanding steps that are still open, such as the listener for the deletion event. You can expand and enhance this process to include multi-step approvals, time-out rules, email notifications, and ending events such as another request created that supersedes the original.

Universal Worklist and the Central Hub

SAP provides a central hub for all notifications and action items. In the back end of the SAP system this is referred to as SAP Business Workplace. On the SAP NetWeaver Portal, this repository is mirrored in the Universal Worklist (UWL). This allows participants to go to one central location to receive and process all work items. Upon reading a notification, recipients are able to take action (for example, approve or reject) directly within the workflow by clicking action buttons (Figure 2).   

Figure 2

UWL central location for accessing user work items

Jonathan Bartlett

Jonathan Bartlett is a senior consultant with Exaserv, Inc., helping companies develop and continuously maintain optimal and high-performing workforces. He specializes in the design and integration of workflow processes within Workforce Management and Talent Management, including Personnel Administration, Organizational Management, E-Recruitment, Learning Solution, and Performance Management. In his current role at Exaserv, Jonathan manages the technical support services team, bringing experience and knowledge to each client, finding ways to streamline their processes. Jonathan holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science.

You may contact the author at jonathanbartlett@exaserv.com.

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