Business ScenarioA department within your company is responsible for approving capital expenditure requests. Whenever someone wants to trigger a new investment, for example, buying a new software product or building a new office building, they need to go through the capital expenditure approval process. Currently, this process is documented but mostly executed manually. Thus, a requester needs to know who to contact for the capital expenditure request. Then, the responsible approvers for the project need to be found depending on the investment type and amount. Once the approval is done, the involved parties need to be informed about its outcome. The whole process can take weeks and has many sources of error, such as responsible people not being available or related documents and mails being lost on their way from one person to the other. The responsible department asks you as (citizen) developer to implement an automated workflow/process that keeps track of all the involved steps, people, and documents. Before you start to create the process from scratch, you browse through the SAP Build Process Automation Store. Fortunately, an appropriate Live Process content is already available for use in the Store. It makes your life easier, as you only need to import the content and do some additional setup and configuration steps.
Prerequisites
Task 1: Activate Live Process Content
Steps
Browse for required live process content in the SAP Build Process Automation store.
From the Application Development Lobby, open the Store.
Filter the available projects by Project TypeLive Process.
Filter for the term Capital Expenditure within the remaining projects.
Select the entry for Capital Expenditure Approval Process.
From the documents section, open the Capital Expenditure Approval Process – Setup guide document.
Find out which services and which destinations have to be configured in order to set your subaccount up for the process content. If you are interested, also have a look at the remaining parts of the document.
Go back into the store search results for Capital Expenditure.
Look for the entry Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Process, and select the Add option. It might take a while until the content has been imported.
Note: This Live Process is designed specifically for educational and sample scenarios. It does not require the usual setup steps in your subaccount, but you can directly import it and try it out.
Open the imported live process content.
Go back to the Lobby. In All Projects, you will see that the new Live Process has been added.
Select the Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Process project.
In a new tab, you will see the overview of all artifacts within the package. It contains a Process Template, two Decision artifacts, and a Visibility Scenario.
Create a new process variant from the Process Template.
In the Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Process row, select the + (Add) icon.
In the New Process Variant dialog, enter Name, High Value Investment.
Select the Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Process from the Process dropdown.
Select Create.
Expand the Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Process row, and select the newly created Process Variant.
The no-code editor for Process Variant creation opens.
From the Available Steps, drag the Approval step, and drop it below the Local Manager Approval step in the process editor so that it gets integrated into the process.
Select the newly created step to see the Step Properties on the right.
Enter CFO Approval as Name.
Enter Second level of approval by the CFO as Description.
Select the Details tab.
Enter CFO as Role Name.
Enter CFO as Approval Step.
Select Save in the upper right of the screen.
Select Activate in the upper right of the screen. A pop-up should tell you, that your Process Variant has been activated successfully.
Close the High Value Investment Process Variant editor.
Adjust the Business Rules template for your live process.
Select the Determine All Approvers Decision artifact.
Select Copy To Draft to copy the released Decision content into a draft project that can be adjusted. Note: When there is a Warning dialog, confirm by selecting Continue.
In the Draft project, select the Auto Approval rule.
Select Edit.
The Auto Approval Text Rule defines when a Capital Expenditure request requires approval, and when it is automatically approved, based on the Total Cost of the investment.
Modify the value in the "If" part of the Text Rule from 10000 to 20000.
Select Save.
Select the Determine Approvers rule.
Enter Full Screen Mode of the Decision Table editor.
Select Edit.
The Determine Approvers Decision Table defines different responsible approvers, based on details given in the Capital Expenditure Request, like the Investment Type, the Country of the investment, the requesting Business Unit, and the corresponding Approval Step name in the process (which you have defined when creating the process variant).
Mark the row that contains the Approval Step GroupHead, and remove it from the table.
Enter your User ID and Email address in both rows, for LocalManager and CFO. Note that you need to provide the values in single quotes (‘example@example.com’). In a real scenario, here, you would provide the User IDs and Email addresses of the users that should actually be responsible for the approval.
Remove the values in the User Group column. These are only required, when you have User Groups that are being provided by your Identity Provider.
Select Save.
Exit Full Screen Mode of the Decision Table editor.
Select Release Version.
In the Release Version dialog, provide a meaningful Description, and select Release.
The new version of the Decision project appears in the version list.
Select Activate.
Activate the process visibility scenario.
Close the Determine All Approvers Decision editor.
Select the Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Dashboard Visibility Scenario artifact.
The Context shows all attributes from the process that are being exposed to the Visibility Scenario. Thus, they can be used to calculate new Attributes, and to create Performance Indicators. Note that there is a separate unit about this topic.
Select Performance Indicators to have a look at the indicators that are included by default in this scenario.
Select Save and Activate.
Start the process to test the configurations.
Close the Sample Capital Expenditure Approval Dashboard Visibility Scenario editor.
Navigate to the Application Development Lobby.
Select Monitor.
In the Manage section, select tile Processes and Workflows.
This app provides an overview of all your released and deployed workflows and processes. In the list, you should find your High Value Investment process variant. Select it.
Select Start New Instance. This lets you start a new instance of the process by providing sample investment data in a JSON format.
Replace the JSON with the following JSON:
Use content from file ./assets/SampleCAPEXRequest.json.
Replace the values of elements UserId and Email with your personal User Id and Email address, that you are using in your SAP Business Technology Platform account.
Select Start New Instance and Close.
Open the My Inbox application of your user.
There should be a new approval task for the Capital Expenditure Request in your role as Local Manager.
Add an Approval Comment of your choice, and select Approve.
Refresh your inbox. There should be another approval task for the Capital Expenditure Request in your role as CFO.
Select Approve. The process will end.
Monitor your process.
Open the Monitor tab within Application Development.
Select the Process and Workflow Instances tile in the Monitor section.
By default, this view only displays process and workflow instances that are in status Erroneous, Running, or Suspended. Select the Filtered By: menu.
Select Status.
Check the box next to Completed, and select OK.
The list now also shows instances that are in status Completed.
Find your completed process instance from the previous task, and examine its information. The Started By: and Started At: fields will let you know which one is the correct instance.
Have a look at the Execution Log. It provides the overview of all steps and subflows that have been executed within the process run. You can dive deeper into the subflow instances, if you like.
Monitor your Process Visibility Scenario Dashboard.
In order to be able to monitor your process visibility dashboard, you need to set up access via SAP workzone standard edition. Check out the End User Access for SAP Build Process Automation unit to learn the required steps.
Result
Congratulations, you have imported and activated your Live Process content package.
Note