Deadline Monitoring in SAP Build Process Automation

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Problem Statement

• In traditional SAP workflow deadline monitoring comes by standard on dialog task allowing SLA driven notification and approval to be managed easily.
• This is also one of most common requirements in SAP Build Process Automation.  In SAP Build Process Automation there is no default deadline monitoring where workitem goes into obsolete and obsolete branch can be modeled for further level of processing.
• This means if it is not incorporated then the threre can be SLA breaches or lags in process and better time to market.

Solution

The solution for escalation in SAP Build Process Automation is Timer events. You can have multiple timer events, such as sending an email after 5 days and sending a workflow approval after 10 days. Check the screenshot below:

*Image1*

We will also be using a Timer event based on “After Task creation,” and after this event, we will be using “Skip to next step” as shown below: 

*Image2*

We will also insert a subprocess that takes the same input as the Input Form. The subprocess output is a flag mapped to a custom variable in the main process, indicating whether the Escalation Manager has “Approved” or “Rejected” the task. See the screenshots of the subprocess and output mapping below:

*Image 3*

*Image 4*        

As we selected "skip to next step" in Image 2, it will skip to the 1st Branch (Approval branch). Here again, we need to check if the work item was approved or rejected by using the custom variable we mapped from the output of the subprocess. We also need to initialize this as true by default since we are in the approval branch. In case the custom variable flag is false, i.e., the escalation manager rejected it, we will branch it to reject branch of main workflow. The final workflow will look something like below.

*Image5*

Conclusion

Using the above approach ensures proper deadline monitoring with multiple levels of approvals and ensures timely completion of processes with no SLA breaches.

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