Overview

SAP Workflow is a tool used to add advanced workflow capabilities to SAP Commissions. It provides a flexible platform that allows customers to automate business workflows between internal and external users. Customers can implement custom workflows that meet their business requirements, provide a seamless user experience and automate many day-to-day tasks and operations.  SAP Workflow is used by customers from diverse industries including manufacturing, supply chain, finance, insurance, telecom, healthcare and technology. Users of SAP Workflow are generally sales compensation teams, sales teams, managers and representatives,  HR teams, and can be used by users external to an organization such as Partners, Dealers and Re-sellers. 

Table of Contents

A deep dive into SAP Workflow

This article will illustrate the features of SAP Workflow, how it enhances SAP Commissions, its usage, how to deploy and maintain the process flows. Whereas below article captivates the nature of a project delivery framework for SAP Workflow.

• Project Delivery Framework for SAP Workflow

Features

Custom Workflows

• Customers are able to configure workflows that meet their specific needs. Using the administrator interface, they can setup any number of statuses, actions, and assignment rules based on their unique process.

Business Rules

• Ensuring that policies and procedures are followed is key to creating a successful business process. These business rules are enforced automatically by SAP Workflow to ensure that customers get expected outcomes and results.

Audit

• SAP Workflow provides a history of all activity in the system in order to provide visibility into how and why resolutions and decisions were made. This also ensures that customers are compliant with any applicable regulations. The Audit log shows the actions performed, performer info, and date & time the action was performed.

Automation

• SAP Workflow enables administrators to automate custom business logic that helps save time and enforce business rules. Scheduled tasks allow customers to initiate actions without intervention from business teams such as creating cases and assigning to specific people or groups based on rules and other criteria.

Integration

• Integrating with external systems is key to linking SAP Workflow to a customer’s larger ecosystem of IT systems. Support of APIs (SOAP and REST), SAML, and connecting to FTP/SFTP sites provides flexible options for sending and receiving integral data and setting up seamless integrations.

Collaboration

• Communication between users is centralized and happens within context of the process in SAP Workflow. Valuable discussions between users is captured, tracked, and preserved for future insight and history. Everyone involved in a process are kept in the loop through email notifications of every activity or emails of only relevant activity.

User organization

• Defining roles and responsibilities in SAP Workflow enables administrators to set data access permissions, limit the actions that can be performed by users, and case visibility permissions. In addition to User Type and Department, users can be grouped in specific permission groups, assignment groups, and notification groups to help administer permissions easier.

External user support

• In addition to allowing a customer’s internal users to access the system, SAP Workflow also enables users external to an organization to access the system. This increases the people that are able to provide input on cases and enables customers to receive inputs directly from external users instead of re-keying data.

Permissions and Authorization

• In order to have a workflow process that provides expected outcomes, it is important that users only have access to data and actions that they are authorized to. SAP Workflow provides functionality that enforces field-level permission and individual action permissions at the user or group level.

Data collection

• Collecting the right data at the right time ensures that users have the information they need to make a good decision. Flexible form designers and custom field fields enable customers to gather information at any point in the workflow process. Instead of requiring that all information is collected a case creation, forms can be presented at any stage in the workflow that is appropriate for the information to be provided.

Seamless user experience with Commissions

• Customers that use SAP Workflow in conjunction with SAP Commissions are able to access SAP Workflow through the Portal. Users can create cases, view and edit cases, and more without needing an additional login or navigate away from the Portal.

Localization support

• Customers will multi-language requirements can make use of the many languages that come supported with SAP Workflow. All customer configuration data, such as custom fields, status names, workflow names, etc., can be entered in both the original language and other required languages. Users can select the language they would like to see the system in or it can be automatically selected based on their browser settings.

Regular releases

• SAP Workflow is a fully multi-tenant application which ensures that customers are always on the latest release. No painful upgrade process or needing to plan when to move to the next release. Customers see regular major releases every quarter with new features and bug fixes.

Flexibility

• Allows coding in Java, Groovy, JDBC and SQL, which enables access to data within SAP Commissions – to implement customized splits and approval process based on your specific needs. Such as your hierarchy, dollar amount, selective based on dollar amount, separate approval processes based on LOB/product lines, and more.

Integration (Outbound)

• Allows outbound integrations with FTP (On Demand Integration / ODI) where you can collect updates or changes done during the day and send them as one batch, at the end of the day.
• Send data immediately to Commission via REST API (recommended for low volume).
• Use SAP Workflow as a backup or proof of approval, when you give your sales compensation team or business team the option to make changes to commission.

Integrations (Inbound)

• Use Integrate the in-house applications to integrate with SAP Workflow through the SAP Workflow REST API. Some common tasks include case creation, getting status on a case, and much more.

Audit

• Use SAP Workflow to capture and maintain approvals from sales plans by sales representatives, authorizations changes on commissions, credits for sales transaction, and much more. 
• Audit log showing actions performed, performer’s information, and date & time action performed (which you can view at anytime)

End-User Access

• SAP Workflow can be used by various end-users. For example, sales representatives, sales managers. 
• Users can use SAP Workflow to access cases as needed to initiate new tasks, review their team score card, performance rating, and so on.

Automation

• SAP Workflow supports a lot of automation, such as automatic case creation (when data dos not pass validation), creates multiple case with excel files, and so on.

Fine Grained Access / Authorization

• Decide which tasks or actions business users can take. This configuration update can be automated through the setup Commission or maintained independently in SAP Workflow

PDF Generation

• Generate customized PDF from templates and merge in customized data. For example, names, titles, addresses, and plan details.

Create Users Automatically From Commissions

• Automatically create participants in Commissions system, as users within SAP Workflow. 

• Users can login into their CallidusCloud Portal and get access to the SAP Workflow application via single sign-on, which eliminates the need to maintain separate logins for SAP Workflow.

Scheduled Tasks

• Initiate actions without intervention from your business teams. Typically used to create cases and assign to specific people or groups, based on rules and other criteria.

Global Usage

• SAP Workflow supports multiple languages– it can be used in many language, in addition to English.

Notifications

• SAP Workflow supports a variety of notifications including notifying a user when a case is assigned, or edits or action taken on a case. SAP Workflow can be customized to notify additional people who may not work on a case but need to know what actions have been taken. These notifications can also be turned off or toned down if a customer feels there will be too many notifications.

Scalability

• SAP Workflow meets your demands, in terms of number of concurrent users, cases per; day, week, and month,
• SAP Workflow is in used with customers that have more than 5,000 sales representatives worldwide.

Usage

SAP Workflow is usually used to ease the life of business teams deploying Commissions or other modules. Here are some of the scenarios:

• Day-to-day operations by sales compensation teams to adjust splits of representatives on sales transactions and obtain approvals for these changes.
• Sales representatives initiating an adjustment or an investigation into a sales transaction.
• Manage & track Bonus, Credit or Deposit approvals.
• Track additional approvals for adjustments that meet certain criteria. For example, adjustment amount requested over "x" dollars and so on.
• Auto create cases– an administrator can provide an excel spreadsheet with information and SAP Workflow can create multiple cases from it and assign them to specific people.
• Obtain approval for plan documents – SAP Workflow is used to capture approval action by sales representatives on updated plans, new plans, and more.
• KPI / representative score card – have sales representatives update their achievements and managers adjust and approve measurements, for their teams. The results are tabulate, then sent to Commissions.
• View consolidated data – SAP Workflow allows you to collect data from multiple sources, within SAP Commissions' systems, and present them in a consolidated manner that will make more sense to you.
• Onboard people onto SAP Commissions – manage complex on-boarding tasks for financial advisers and sales representatives. 

Development & Maintenance of Process Flows

SAP Workflow is a very intuitive tool that maintains your business processes. If you are familiar with Java or Groovy programming language, cloud or SaaS based applications, you can quickly learn to create new processes or make changes to existing processes – called SAP Workflows. The technical resource does not need to be an expert in HTML or CSS – basic understanding is usually enough. To make sure your code can compile, there is a built-in editor for Java code with a test compile feature. Moreover, use the drag & drop form to design your user interface.

Conclusion

If you need more information on SAP Workflow’s capabilities and additional usage scenarios, please call your account representative. You can also ask your product manager and or members from the cloud operations team, they could answer your queries, recommend solutions that fit your needs, and address any concerns.

Here is the link to product  Documentation