Run transaction RZ04 – Double click on the “DUMMY Self-Configured Operation Mode” line. Click once on the line (probably the only one) that contains the incorrect host name. Now click on the “Delete Instance” icon. Confirm when asked if you want to delete all the instance data. Now go to the “Settings->Based on Current Status->New Instances->Generate” menu item. Click the save button, and you are done.

Ok now you have gotten the hard work done – on to the easy part!

It’s actually very simple – Everything you need to do has been nicely packaged into transaction SWU3. If you go there, you will see a whole lot of red crosses indicating that the configuration has not been done. In the transaction, you will see 5 top level nodes:

• Maintain Runtime Environment
• Maintain Definition Environment
• Maintain Additional Settings and Services
• Classify Tasks as General
• Guided Procedures

All you have to do is highlight each node, and then click on the “Perform Automatic Workflow Customizing” button or press F9. As you go through this, you will notice that most of the red crosses turn into green checks. If any of them do not change from the red cross, you can simply highlight the individual offender to see the corresponding documentation on the right side of the screen. There are a few items that need to be manually process like “Maintain Prefix Numbers” and some others. Then there are some of the entries that you don’t need to get to a green check because, for instance, you won’t have a J2EE server for “Maintain Guided Procedures Gateway”.

Just go through all the entries to make sure that they are configured, or confirm that you don’t need to configure them. As mentioned earlier, the documentation for each entry is listed on the right side of the screen and it is extremely helpful in guiding you through problems.

Once you are done you can click on the “Start Verification Workflow (F5)” button. If the system asks you to activate event linkage, say yes. If need be, enter transport details. It will then tell you “Verification workflow started”:

1. Go to the Business Workplace.

You will find a user decision work item in your workflow inbox.

2. Execute this work item and select a decision.

You receive two mails. These are the notifications of completion for this user decision and the subsequent background step.

You should now have successfully tested the workflow environment – If all went well then you have set everything up correctly, and you can begin to develop and test your own custom or SAP delivered workflows.

One of my recent projects included an HR Leave workflow that had already been worked on by 4 other consultants – none of them managed to complete the job ; no one in the business knew “who did what” ; transports were a mess ; the wheel was reinvented far too many times. I landed up undoing a lot of their work, and reverted to using standard business objects, steered clear of using custom tables, and added meaningful and valuable descriptions to tasks and workflow templates. By the end of it the client had a working leave workflow, which was a lot simpler in design but achieved exactly what was needed – Not only that, but the end users love the fact that more meaningful content is now being delivered to them. In the big scheme of things, user acceptance is everything – Why didn’t the previous consultants emphasize this? Even more importantly, why didn’t the previous workflow consultants finish the job properly? Because they didn’t know how to.

Another typical example recently popped up with a client of mine – I was asked to quote on the design and development of 11 QM Notification workflows. The consultant that previously worked on the project adopted a very rigid design that did not allow for any change to the business process. They also told the client that certain things could not be done. After my initial assessment, I proposed a generic workflow design that would mean one workflow for all notification types. My design included the flexibility for business change and growth – It was not restricted to particular notification types. QM configuration was used to manage deadlines and task processing. In the end, instead of creating eleven new workflows, only one was needed – It had a much simpler design, and achieved a lot more, while still reducing future maintenance costs.

The moral of the story:

• Inexperience = Low initial cost, future redesign,lower business value, less return on investment, higher overall cost of ownership.
• Experience = Higher initial cost, higher business value, higher return on investment, lower overall cost of ownership.

Experience conquers all!

Benefits of SAP Workflow:

• Eliminate human error
• Reduce process times
• Increase vendor / customer satisfaction
• Improve the SAP user experience
• Reduce business process costs
• Measurable return on investment
• Full audit trails

If you don’t know much about SAP Workflow, have a quick read here to get an overview.

The IT world has already been affected by news of the global recession with CIOs facing shrinking budgets, limiting new projects, and prospects of staff layoffs. CFOs increasingly cast their critical eyes on the till to realise most IT shops are behemoths on the spending front. For large companies, SAP budget/spend often runs into 10s or even 100s millions of rands which takes up a significant portion of the overall IT budget. As a result, it gets special attention/scrutiny from CFOs. Their conversations with their IT counterparts often involve a butcher knife in one hand and ready to slice IT budget on the fly.

While seasoned SAP & IT professionals who have been through the early-90s recession and the more recent Internet bubble have seen all this before, there’s a need across the board to re-think strategy in the face of radically reduced budgets.

Ironically this can be a time of enormous opportunity for IT departments: cutting costs, increasing flexibility and proving an ability to generate returns while others are wringing their hands will mark out winners from losers over the next 18-24 months, and IT is at the heart of this internal efficiency transformation.

Listen carefully to the needs of the business

Economic downturns create a tighter focus on value, which means IT departments are under more pressure than ever to demonstrate quantifiable improvements for money spent. Business users often feel victimised through the process of SAP implementation which often forces the business to adapt to a generic set of business processes. It is at these times, their complaints become more vocal than ever.

It is now the time to listen to their needs and address their concerns and negative perception of IT as during tough times, unpopular and costly SAP department can be a toxic combination. Usability is often a key issue for the majority of SAP users, addressing key areas of pain in usability can go a long way to improve user productivity, perception and cut training costs.

It is time for innovation and flexibility

During time of recession, successful businesses do not just slash their IT budgets – they look for investments in IT innovations to create new efficiencies and to be first out of the traps when market conditions change. The key to survival in the current environment is characterised by much shorter innovation cycles and the requirement to get goods and services to market more quickly.

SAP traditionally positions its products as tools to provide enterprises with a competitive edge. With many large enterprises now running SAP, your organisation may not be all that different from competitors in terms of its IT infrastructure. The time to innovate is now.

Engage smaller SAP consultancies

Business advantage can prove short-lived as economies contract, dramatically increasing competition. This drives a need for radical change without the budgets normally associated with this kind of re-invention.

Traditionally CIOs have felt secure using large SAP consultancies with the ability to pull together large project teams to support R multi-million installations often with 2-3 year time frames. In the current economic climate there are a number of factors that undermine this approach:

1. Large consultancies often won’t engage in smaller, sub-R500k SAP projects. With massive overheads and large teams from pre-sales to account management to project delivery, they just can’t mobilise the right resources for smaller more nimble deliveries. With a limited SAP budget, smaller consultancies are far better positioned to respond to your needs.
2. With a skills investment strategy often defined years in advance, bigger consultancies build large resource pools around established technologies. This acts as a block to innovation, where more agile consultancies are free to explore new techniques as soon as they become available and compete on innovation rather than raw manpower.
3. Smaller companies tend to be more responsive and focused on client needs. Demanding projects more quickly for less investment is exactly the sort of challenge growing consultancies relish, where larger businesses may simply refuse.

Smaller companies are typically more responsive, flexible and innovative. Due to their low overheads, they can also be very cost effective with smaller projects. If you’re looking for SAP innovation delivered in the shortest possible timeframe and at lowest possible cost, it is time to engage smaller SAP consultancies.

Rethink/reprioritise your SAP upgrade strategy

SAP has traditionally released products and made major changes to underlying functionality on a 5-year schedule. However in recent years, this cycle has shortened to 2-3 years due to their diversification in products such as CRM and Enterprise Portal – there have been 5 major releases of CRM in the space of just 8 years.

For companies with global deployments, multi-terabyte databases, and tens of thousands of users, an upgrade project is often disruptive, expensive and deeply unpopular. SAP recognised and acknowledged this problem in the recent years. With the shipment of its ERP 6.0 product, instead of bundling 2-3 years of product enhancements and technology improvements into one massive release, SAP has now moved to what it calls a continuous innovation strategy by releasing smaller enhancement packages.

But what if you’re not on ERP 6.0 and have other SAP products? In the current tough business conditions, businesses are less likely to have the appetite to spend large sum of money and face significant business disruption to take on major upgrade projects just to take advantage of some functionality improvements. There is an alternative.

You could build solutions on top of your existing SAP platform to provide the additional functionality that the business demands, without embarking on a major upgrade programme. More functionality in a fraction of the time and at far lower cost leads to vastly reduced risk and much faster return on investment.

Maximise your existing SAP investment

CIOs who worked with SAP before 1999 would know that SAP was known as a one-product company, which had a much less confusing naming convention for its products and releases (R/1, R/2 and R/3). Since then, SAP has accumulated dozens of products with a large set of options, variants and names such as Customer Relationship Management, Product Life Cycle Management, and Business Intelligence etc. This diversification strategy aimed to sell new products and licenses to new and existing customers. SAP product licenses are not cheap. With the recent hike in maintenance cost, a business case which involves buying product licences, cost of implementing and customising the standard product, deployment, getting new infrastructure/support capabilities and paying annual maintenance cost can be an extremely difficult proposition to present to the board.

Therefore, similar to the upgrade question, you can/should look to maximise your investment in existing SAP solutions. With introduction of NetWeaver and Web Application Server, SAP has effectively exposed itself as a technology platform. With its support for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), it allows customers and partners to use it to extend SAP applications or even build brand-new application. This provides the opportunity for SAP customers to develop new functionalities utilising innovative technology on top of your existing SAP platforms such as ERP rather than making new product acquisitions. The list of potential savings include: no additional license/maintenance cost, infrastructure and you can leverage existing skills. Adding these up, the savings should start to make a lot of sense.

Apart from utilising your SAP solution as a technology platform for extending existing functionality, another quick win can come from a simple audit of your existing SAP products and licenses. Unless you have done one recently, you may be surprised how many shelfware products and licenses you have got and been paying for which your business is not utilising. With the recent SAP maintenance cost hike, you can potentially save your business a lot of money just by doing a simple audit.

Change before you have to – Jack Welsh

CIOs have an opportunity to act now before the recessionary economy forces them to. The easy option is to stop projects, get rid of contractors, layoff staff and go into ‘maintenance mode’, but this won’t help your business gain competitive advantage, which it critically needs to survive and emerge stronger.

Adopting a more flexible approach and strategy for different times to continue to deliver value to the business can help making SAP/IT the true differentiator in supporting the business to remain competitive during the time of recession.

Reference: Recession Proof Your SAP Strategy

Each step of a business transaction can be easily monitored as processes are completed from beginning to end. Workflow allows process owners to keep an eye on deadlines, provides statistics on the length of time to complete work processes, determine the workload with regard to individual employees, and save processing time. Since Workflow can deliver work items to employees automatically via email, they do not have to wait or inquire about the status of a particular process.

Benefits of SAP Workflow

The quality of the process is assured by pushing the relevant information together with links to related transactions directly to the user. Managers don’t have the time to search for information so give them what they need to reach the correct decision.

Cycle time is reduced by pushing the process directly to the users. The users receive notification of a task immediately and can even be prioritized by the system.

The tasks are performed consistently and diligently by the users. The workflow system pushes all the necessary information needed to perform a task, including a clear description of what has to be done, how to do it and the impact this task has on the business process for your company. At any time, the user can check the list of tasks pending and determine at a glance which are the important tasks, and which tasks can be completed the next day without any negative impact.

The process instance is transparent. Any user can check at any time how far the process has progressed and which stage the process has reached. For example the call centre can immediately see the status of a purchase order, an employee requisitioning a purchase would see at a glance if a colleague has been sitting on it for too long, the ad hoc notes made when approving an engineering change request are visible long after the request has gone into production.

The process is flexible, allowing it to be changed on the fly without retraining everyone involved. The description accompanying the change takes care of on-the-fly process improvements.

Deadline handing ensures that users perform the tasks within the time planned. Escalation measures ensure that the failure to meet a deadline can be corrected by other means.

Intelligent reporting highlights the weaknesses of a process. Often there is a simple cure to such weaknesses such as reeducating the users involved in the bottleneck or providing additional information (automatically). The difficulty of a non-automated process is identifying such bottlenecks.

The process definition is transparent. You can see at a glance how the process works and who will be selected to perform the different tasks. Think of the workflow as the process book. If you can spot the pattern and define the process without headaches, you can create a workflow definition effortlessly. However, don’t forget that if a company has business processes that are erratic and lack a consistent pattern, the company is very likely to be losing a lot of money in terms of lost contracts, labour intensive administration and low customer confidence. It is my personal opinion that automating exactly this type of process will yield the best returns, but only if you limit yourself to automating the basic skeleton of the process first. Don’t get bogged down in the detailed exception handling. That can be done in the next phase once you’ve checked the process statistics and determined which exceptions are worth tackling.

Conclusion

As with most software, the reasons for automating business processes are primarily to increase the competitive edge of your company and to cut costs. Competitive edge is gained by radically reducing process times and human errors.

Cost savings due to implementing SAP workflow are thus measured by comparing the current error-prone manual process againsts a more robust automated process.

Reference: SAP Business Workflow

This book is every Workflow consultant’s bible, and if you ever want to get into SAP Workflow without being able to afford the Workflow Academy, this is the book to buy – At about $80 (+/- R640), it might seem a little costly, but I can assure you that it will be your most valuable resource that you will ever acquire when it comes to SAP Workflow.