New Reporting Permission for Workflow Process Request Data for People Analytics Story Reporting

[FrankErle]

The permission settings that are provide for managing workflow requests are optimized for the workflow request management. The existing permissions related to the Workflow processing are dedicated to very specific activities and are not suited to be evaluated in reporting. In particular many customers are hesitating to provide the permission for “Manage Workflow Requests” to all report users. Starting from 1H 2505 a new reporting permission “Report Workflow Process Details” was introduced which is evaluated in story reports dealing with workflow requests. This blogpost highlights the reasons why this new permission was created.

Introduction

In an ideal case the setup of the workflows works fully automated, i.e. workflow requests are created for various kind of changes such as e.g. leave requests, salary changes, promotions, hires, transfers, terminations and many more. As soon as a particular change is done, a workflow request is created dependent of the workflow configuration which appears in the ToDo-List of the respective processor; typically managers, cost centre responsible managers, HR administrators and others.

Only in exceptional cases it is required that a very limited group of administrators checks the workflow requests and might trigger respective changes (e.g. changes the approver since the configured approver is on a longer absence). The cockpit for such activities is the Admin Center activity “Manage Workflow Requests”. Figure 1 shows this activity with the search functionality (shown in red) and the potential actions that can be triggered (shown in yellow), as e.g. changing the approver or adding other approvers. With access to “Manage Workflow Requests” it is possible (1) to see the sensitive content of a workflow (even if a user does not have access e.g. to the sensitive compensation details) and (2) to make changes into the workflow process, such as e.g. approving, declining, withdrawing and commenting workflow requests.

Before H1 2505 “Manage Workflow Requests” was evaluated for workflow reporting in People Analytics. However, workflow request related reports are typically rolled out for a much larger group of report users compared to the smaller audience of HR administrators which monitor “Manage Workflow Requests”. Therefore, starting from H1 2505 a new reporting permission “Report Workflow Process Details” was introduced which is evaluated in story reports dealing with workflow requests.

Figure 1   Admin Center activity “Manage Workflow Requests”

Figure 2   Example of a Workflow Requests

Solution Approach

Figure 3 shows this new permission setting “Report Workflow Process Details”. Only if this permission is granted, then Workflow Requests details can be reported. To prevent disruptions to existing story reports with workflow request data, the new permission “Report Workflow Process Details” is automatically granted to those roles which have already the permission for "Manage Workflow Requests".

Figure 3   Role Based Permission settings under “Manage Workflows”

Also note that reports based on MDF objects which should report the respective workflow details require the permission “Report Workflow Process Details” so that the workflow details are accordingly filled. Figure 4 shows such a use case as example; with such a report it is possible to report on both, the approved record (where Position-mdfRecordStatus is filled with “N”) together with the pending record (Position-mdfRecordStatus = “P”) while the pending record will provide the respective workflow details as long as permission for “Report Workflow Process Details” is granted (if the permission for “Report Workflow Process Details” is not given, the workflow fields will remain empty).

In this context it is also worth to mention that starting from 1H 2025 a join was implemented from custom MDF objects to “Generic Object Workflow Request” which allow to create queries based on the custom MDF object with the respective workflow details. Prerequisite is that the attribute “pending data” is set to "yes" on Admin Center -> Configure Object Definition (note that for 'standard' MDF objects as e.g. 'Position' as shown in Figure 4 the join was already generated before 1H 2025). This enhancement allows to track e.g. who approved a request and when this was done as well as for pending workflow requests to track who is responsible for approval.

Figure 4   Example of a query which provides MDF details together with respective workflow details