Decentralised Material Master Creation Workflow

[Former Member]

My company wants to put in a workflow to create materials, I have been working on some ideas on and off over the last few weeks, but I am struggling to finalise the solution.

The business wants a decentralised system whereby various departments create various views of the material, i.e. suuply chain create the purchasing views, material control creates the MRP and work scheduling views etc.

I have no porblem building the basic workflow definition, but I am struggling with the part where I have to split up the various maintenance views by department.

I am using BUS1001006 as my main business object and I have tried 2 different approaches, neither of which is working exactly as I want it too:

Firstly I am triggering the workflow when a user creates the basic data view of a material, the workflow should then route the remaining MM views/screens to various depts.

1... I have tried to use the method GETMISSEDVIEWS with a fork into subsequent steps using method CREATEVIEWS. This doesn't seem to work since the method CREATEVIEWS seems to insist that the user creates ALL the missing views not just some of the missing views he/she is responisble for. This results in the work items dissappearing from the inboxes of others in the fork.

2... I have tried to simply create a fork into subsequent stetps using the method CREATE but for some strange reason when I use this method the material number does not come to the CREATE task even though there is binding from &BUS1001006& -> &_WI_OBJECT_ID& in my workflow step.

If someone can help me get past either of these two obstacles I'll be sorted

many thanks.

Edited by: Neil Ward on Nov 16, 2010 2:14 PM

[pokrakam · Accepted solution]

G'Day Neil,

I believe it should be possible without coding, but memory is very rusty as my more recent work in this area has been completely bespoke. The CREATEVIEW method should be called using dynamic parallel processing. You may want to put this in a subworkflow so that you can easily introduce different behaviours for different views. This way each view is processed independently.

Material masters are usually highly individualised processes, which is why I assume no standard SAP flow exists. Some can be cobbled together without code, and others are a little more complex. I've spent months and even years building material master processes at various customers.

Cheers,

Mike

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike and thanks for the response.

I'm willing to persue either of the 2 methods I outlined in my original post to achieve a working solution.

In the case of the CREATEVIEWS method, would you mind elaborating a bit more on parallel processing, i.e. how exactly do I set this up?

I'm a bit of workflow noob, having done the SAP course and set up a few standard workflow using templates I know my round the funcitonality but I'm no seasoned pro. This is the first workflow I'm having to build myself and as such I'm a little shaky.

I greatly appreciate the help from you guys

[pokrakam · Accepted solution]

Oh dear, material master is pretty much the deep end of workflow but don't let that stop you.

Have a look through the help on dynamic parallel processing. BAsically if you have a table of elemetns you create one task (or subworkflow) for each item. This is defined in the miscellaneous tab and the binding defines which single recipient container element each entry in the source table container element is bound to.