Empowering business to manage Decisions in SAP Build Process Automation

[Sesh_Sreenivas]

SAP Build Process Automation is a unified, low-code solution designed to help customers to digitize and streamline business operations. A core component of this offering is Decisions. Decision artefacts helps to decouple complex rules from your code, making them easier to maintain and evolve over a period of time. Whether you are implementing approval policies, pricing logic, eligibility checks, or compliance controls, business rules can be defined in a structured, transparent format. These rules are integrated seamlessly into processes, ensuring consistency and flexibility in end to end processes.

🚀 Today, we're excited to launch a dedicated application (Studio Home) that empowers business users to view and/or maintain decisions without needing to navigate into SAP Build Lobby, rather from a SAP Build Work Zone site.

Motivation

Decisions are created as part of a process automation project from the SAP Build Lobby. Lobby is a powerful application development environment designed for developers (and citizen developers). It support tasks like creating a new project, new data type, new decisions, new process, automation, etc. However, it is not necessarily optimized for an everyday business users who often own the logic behind the business rules (Decisions in SAP Build Process Automation).

Figure 1 shows a project as seen in the Lobby. In this example, the Lobby project contains additional artefact like Data Type, information like Creation, Bundle Size, Collaborators, Project Settings, Triggers, Dependencies and actions like Create, Import, Release etc. While this is valuable for developers and citizen developers, it's overwhelming for business users whose primary need is to view or update data in existing decisions like maintain approval limits, routing logic, or adjusting discount rates. For these users, exposing unrelated artefacts and technical options adds unnecessary complexity. It also introduces a risk - users might unintentionally view or change artefacts or properties beyond their scope which can impact the stability of the overall project.

Hence until now, business users had no choice but to rely on developers to make even simple rule changes. This dependency created friction, delayed updates, and slowed down the entire change management cycle.

Figure 1: Project overview page as seen in the Lobby

Lightweight decision management for end users

Once configured by the SAP Build Workzone site administrator, the users are presented with application tiles in their SAP Build Workzone site. This respects all the roles, groups, space & catalog configuration of SAP Build Workzone. Each tile corresponds to one process automation project in the Lobby. The user can click on the tile as shown in the Figure 2, to navigate into the application to manage Decisions.

Figure 2: SAP Build Workzone application to manage decisions

They are presented with an application (Studio Home) that lists all the Decisions contained within a project for which the tile was configured. In this example project 'Purchase Requisition Decisions', there are three Decisions artefacts as represented in Figure 3.

Studio Home application

Figure 3: Studio Home application to manage decisions within a project

The Studio Home application is a simplified view of the Lobby project and shows only relevant & simplified information to the end user:

1. Decision-Focused View: Only the relevant artefacts within the project (Decisions) are visible, keeping the interface clean and user-friendly.
2. One-Click Deployment: A single button that lets users to automatically release a patch version of the project & deploy it by retaining all previous environment variables. The end users don't have to understand about patch, minor, major versioning, its implications, the concept of environments & environment variables.
3. Design Console: Design Console that shows any error or warning messages during the release and deployment, similar to the experience in the Lobby project.
4. Version History Access: Option to navigate and view the previous versions of the decision artefact in the project.

The user can select one Decision and navigate into the decision editor, that opens up a simplified decision editor. The user is presented with an interface that lists all the available rules (Decision Table and Text Rule) as shown in Figure 4. Unlike in Lobby, the user does not have options like inputs, outputs, variables of the Decision, nor they will have option to reorder/create new rule (decision table or text rule). The breadcrumbs control (highlighted in Figure 4) at the top of screen can be used to navigate back to the project. 

Figure 4: Decision editor with list of rules

When the user selects a rule (text rule or decision table), the appropriate rule editor is presented. The Figure 5 shows a decision table editor. The goal of this interface is also to be simple and only show what is relevant for a business users - edit the content of the decision table, export to excel, import from excel and save the changes. The decision table settings to define condition columns, result columns, setting the hit policy, etc. are not shown to the user. The similar is the experience for a text rule editor. Once the changes to the rules are made, the user can use the breadcrumb control at the top of screen to navigate to the project and deploy the changes with a single click of a button.

Figure 5: Decision table editor 

What else is new

We are constantly trying to improve the user experience for the end users and one area of our focus is expression editing in decision tables. Figure 6 shows the current state of expression editing in decision table. The expression editors in our rules had an auto-suggest list (3) which can be brought up by pressing the keys <ctrl> and <space> in the expression editor (2). To bring up the expression editor in a decision table, the decision table cell need to be clicked (1). Our customers shared a feedback that working with complex expressions is tedious with the auto-suggest and at the same time expert users find it less productive requiring a lot of clicks.

Figure 6: Expression editing in decision tables until today

While we are looking at making the expression editing more useable (watch this space for a redesigned expression editing), we have now enabled a small change in the decision table editor:

• Select the cell (single-click) to start typing directly as shown in Figure 7. 
• Double-click the cell to open the expression editor, especially for long/complex expressions.
• Use <ctrl> and <space> (option + space for MacOS) anytime to bring up the auto-suggest list.

This makes simple edits faster and more intuitive while still supporting advanced expression editing. Syntax errors, if any, are automatically detected and highlighted.

Figure 7: Edit the expression directly in the cell with a single-click

How to set it up

Refer to the official help documentation for configuring a tile.

Tip:

On click on the "Deploy All" button the entire project is released as a version and that version is deployed. If there are other artefacts (like data type, automation, process) in the same project they are also included in the version deployment. There are possibilities of other artefacts in an error state, which prevents the deployment. If you would not want that behaviour, then move the decisions into a separate project. I will soon share in another blog post how one can setup a project like that.

Things to note

• The Studio Home application can auto only be configured to deploy in a shared environment. If you are still using the Public environment to deploy the projects, refer to the blog from @Alex-Fortin about how to transition from public environment.
• Since the user will still work on the project, release a version and deploy the user must have ProcessAutomationDeveloper role (advanced user).
• The user should also have the authotization for the Lobby project.

Closing thoughts

The introduction of the new Studio Home for maintaining decisions marks an important step towards empowering business users to take ownership of maintaining and owning the data maintained in the Decisions artefact. By simplifying the way decisions are maintained we aim to reduce dependencies & accelerate change management process. Last but not the lease, this is just a beginning and we look forward to support intuitive and business-friendly decision management in SAP Build.