Overview

Overview of the Project Delivery Framework for SAP Workflow

An SAP Workflow implementation is a way of customizing and providing flexibility to adapt to the customer’s needs. In general, it is used when implementing SAP Commissions and the need to enhance functionality and add customer-specific process flows exist. Care needs to be taken to ensure there is valid ROI.

It is very important to define a success criteria, that is, what defines a successful implementation. You may be surprised by what defines success.

For the successful implementation of an SAP Workflow project, the most important pieces of information to gather is who does what, when, and why. At every step during the requirements phase, you need to keep these in mind.

Below are some pointers for every phase of an SAP Workflow implementation project.

Table of Contents

Delivering SAP Workflow by Project Phases

The project delivery framework for SAP Workflow has been adapted and aligned with the below phases, which have been summarized for quick reference purposes. The five phases and high-level stream view are presented below.

Prepare

The purpose of this phase is to ensure all key information has been collected to that implementation team can review and prepare for detailed requirements gathering. It is very important to ensure project team members who will have roles throughout the implementation process be assigned and allocated proper time.

Prepare Activities

• Provision workflow environment and ensure administrator access
• Readiness checklist
  • Document existing workflows (if any)
  • Document proposed workflows and new workflows 
  • Provide permission matrix for business users and administrators

Explore

The purpose of this phase is for the implementation team to meet with the customer and business users to understand the current process, the to-be process, to provide feedback on what works and does not work, and to set up roles and responsibilities of the team members. 

Explore Activities

• Provide a demonstration of how SAP Workflow works including the typical actions and navigation that business users need to do.
• Ask the following questions: Who does what, when and why? Ask these question at every step.
• Automate tasks and processes to reduce the intervention from business teams as much as possible while allowing the business to retain control.
• Tightly integrate with core data sources, for example,SAP Commissions, and pull data from these as much as possible, for example, participants, positions, hierarchy, sales orders, transactions, and assignments.
• Get the details on the SAP Workflow usage:
  • The number of cases created per day, week, and year. You may need to consider for a 12 month period as some activities, for example, plan approval, occur only once a year.
  • The number of users in the field. Is the solution available to the entire sales team or only to business users?
  • The number of users in the business teams as well as others.
• Review the inbound integrations. These are sources from which the SAP Workflow will receive and potentially consume data.
• Review the outbound integrations. These are systems to which the SAP Workflow will push the data.
• Involve the customer’s IT team who will maintain the solution in the future, as well as the customer’s IT Security and Compliance team.
• Confirm and document the workflows to be implemented. Include task(s) that will need to be done daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and any additional criteria to ensure the process is clearly defined.
• Request that the customer loads actual data. This is very useful during the build phase.

Realize

The purpose of this phase is for the implementation team to design and build / configure the solution as per the approved requirements. After the build / configure is complete, the customer verifies the solution in an environment that closely matches the intended production environment to ensure it is as per the requirements and meets the business needs.

Realize Activities

• Build / Configure
  • Continue ongoing feedback while remaining within the confinements of the defined requirements.
  • Test using expected business roles and actual business scenarios:
    • If the SAP Workflow needs to create 2000 cases from an upload file, upload a file with 2000 entries and confirm the 2000 cases were created.
  • Differentiate between the business administrator and the technical administrator and identify who will require SAP Workflow Administrator privileges.
  • Provide details to the customer’s IT team who will maintain it in the future as well as the Security and Compliance team and obtain approval. This will ensure that there are no surprises when you are in the go-live planning phase.
  • Know the constraints of the SAP Workflow product, the SaaS environment, and ensure you are building the solution around it.
  • Request that the customer prepares a test plan and presents it for review approximately three weeks before Verify phase / UAT starts.
• Verify
  • Business users use the solution to verify it meets requirements and business needs. Encourage business users of every type, for example, compensation manager, compensation team member, sales manager, and sales representative to participate.
  • Kick off Verify stage by giving a detailed step-by-step demonstration of the “to-be” implementation.
  • Set up a defect management tool.
  • Have a defect resolution plan and define what constitutes a blocking issue versus a critical issue. Have the implementation team create a turnaround plan for each issue type.
  • The business should test expected functionality for the first week and identify gaps in the implementation versus the expectations (that is, happy path testing). Refrain from starting negative testing until at least 50% of the test cases pass.
  • Test critical features first. These are gating features which must work for the system to go-live.
  • Test end-to-end. Ensure the entire system works.
  • Prepare a plan for time-dependent tests (for example, if a reminder needs to be sent on the sixth day, have a plan to simulate day six on the second or the third day rather than waiting for day six).
  • Give a technical walk-through to the customer's IT team in preparation of the handover.

Deploy

In this phase, the implementation team and the customer's team will migrate the solution from UAT to the live (Production) environment and will make the solution available to all intended users.

Deploy activities

• Resolve any crucial open issues and conduct cut-over activities.
• Create the operational handbook and conduct a handover workshop.
• Work with the customer to create a roll-out strategy.
• Execute the transition plan from Services to Support.

Run

The purpose of the Run phase is to utilize the new solution to achieve the benefits offered by a more accurate and simplified quoting process. The customer may choose at this stage to work further with the implementation team on additional enhancements. 

Conclusion

This project framework is applicable either as a standalone implementation or as part of the overall SAP Customer Experience solutions. You can refer to Overall SAP Customer Experience solutions Project Framework to learn more about the project setup with multiple solutions across the portfolio. 

To access all our community or out-of-the-box product documentation, please check out our List of Online Resources.

Please also have a deep dive look into SAP Workflow and how it fits into SAP Commissions

• A Deep Dive Into SAP Workflow
• Project Delivery Framework for SAP Commissions