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Chapter 7
ERP WORKFLOW TOOLS
Most business processes are performed regularly, enabling employees responsible for the
process to become efficient in the tasks involved in the process. For example, the sales
order process is fundamental to a manufacturing business; the salespeople, sales order
clerks, warehouse managers, accounts receivable clerks, and others spend most of their
day supporting the process. If the process is efficiently designed and managed, and the
employees are properly trained, workers will experience enough repetition to become
efficient in their daily tasks.
Some business processes, however, are performed only sporadically. Often, such
200 processes are inefficient, especially when the processes involve more than one functional
area. Work may “fall through the cracks,” not necessarily through negligence, but due to a
lack of repetition. For example, the process of establishing credit limits may occur only
occasionally and may require coordination between the Sales Department, which
identifies new customers and gathers basic data (contact names, addresses, contract terms
and conditions) and the Accounts Receivable Department, which evaluates a customer’s
credit history to establish a credit limit. Unless employees manage the process of
establishing a credit limit properly, a new customer’s order may be blocked for an
unacceptable length of time. For sporadic processes such as this, a workflow software tool
can help employees avoid “dropping the ball” by providing tools for tracking and
monitoring the tasks in the project and providing reminders to the employees involved.
Workflow tools are software programs that automate the execution of business
processes and address all aspects of a process, including the process flow (the logical steps
in the business process), the people involved (the organization), and the effects (the
process information that documents the process steps). ERP software provides a workflow
management system that supports and speeds up business processes. It enables employees
to carry out complex business processes and track the current status of a process at
any time.
The SAP ERP workflow tool, called SAP Business Workflow, links employees to the
business transactions that need to be performed. In a normal business process, an
employee uses his or her knowledge to determine what transactions to process at what
times. Sometimes this work is triggered by an external source, such as a customer call
that causes the sales order clerk to perform the sales order creation transaction. In other
cases, an employee uses a reporting tool to determine what transactions need to be
processed. For example, as discussed in Chapter 5, industrial credit management is
implemented by blocking sales orders when there is a credit issue. The blocked sales
order report (shown in Figure 5-7) is the report that an employee can use to decide what
transactions must be processed to resolve the credit issue.
In the case of sporadic processes, the SAP Business Workflow tool proactively
connects employees with business transactions using SAP’s internal email system and
workflow tasks, which are email messages that can include basic information, notes, and
documents, as well as direct links to business transactions. The SAP system can monitor
workflow tasks, and if the tasks are not completed on time, the workflow system can
automatically take various actions, including changing the workflow task priority and
sending email reminders to the employees responsible for the work.
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