Managing Approval Workflows with SAP Signavio Process Manager and Process Governance

With SAP Signavio Process Governance, you can create and manage approval workflows and other types of workflows to streamline your processes. To define and manage workflows, you must have a license for SAP Signavio Process Governance in addition to the licenses for SAP Signavio Process Manager. Additionally, you have to be an administrator in both components. This combination allows you to configure and manage workflows effectively, ensuring smooth and consistent approval processes.

Approval workflows ensure a diagram is reviewed and approved by a specific group of people before it is published. This helps maintain consistent quality across all diagrams in your organization.

An example approval workflow is assigned to each workspace that can be configured according to your organization's needs. Find more details in the admin guide and developer guide.

You as an administrator, prepare the necessary setup so the workflow creator can use these "Manage Approval Workflow" settings. This is managed within the SAP Signavio Process Manager.

Watch the video to get a detailed understanding of below configuration options:

• General
• Diagram states
• Participants
• Approval Expiration

To access the administrative settings in SAP Signavio Process Governance, click on your initials. First, let's review the Organizational Settings.

Now that you have learned how to manage approval workflows using SAP Signavio Process Manager, this section will focus on the administrative tasks performed through SAP Signavio Process Governance.

Users involved in approval or other workflows, as well as those who create and manage workflows, require a license.

You are not automatically an administrator for SAP Signavio Process Governance if you are an administrator in SAP Signavio Process Manager and Collaboration Hub. You need to be promoted by the respective administrator.

In the below graphic you see how an administrator is granting admin rights to Marie May. This can be undone by clicking again on the same icon to revoke the rights.

In SAP Signavio Process Governance, you can also manage users and create groups that can be utilized across workflows. Watch the video to get a deeper understanding of why groups are useful, and how they are created and managed via SAP Signavio Process Governance.

As an administrator, you have multiple options to efficiently organize and configure your workflows in SAP Signavio Process Governance. To do this, navigate to Organization Settings and switch to the Workspace tab.

The time zone is automatically determined by the browser or other parameters, and conversions happen seamlessly. However, consider this scenario:

Your BPM team announces to all stakeholders that a new process has been published and schedules an introduction session for a specific date and time. If the recipients are in different time zones, the notification will be sent based on the workspace time. This is where you can ensure clarity by explicitly stating the host’s time zone, preventing any confusion that might arise from automatic local time conversions.

If your organization wants to allow a specific group to create workflows, you first should create this group – check the box and select the group you created for that. After this is done, the create button will be inactive for the ones not allowed to create processes in SAP Signavio Process Governance.

By default, SAP Signavio Process Governance sends notifications to inform workflow participants about task assignments and other updates. To provide users with more context on which team manages the workflow system, you can customize the email signature. Additionally, a daily summary of workspace changes is sent to users. If you prefer to limit notifications, you can disable this option by checking the Disable the daily digest mails box, which will override individual user settings and prevent daily digest emails from being sent.

In SAP Signavio Process Governance, labels help categorize and filter workflows efficiently. By defining labels, you can indicate workflow areas and statuses, such as whether a workflow is in draft. This enhances organization and makes it easier to find relevant workflows.

In SAP Signavio Process Governance, you can configure additional activities that can be reused in workflows. These activities must be set up by an administrator before other users can incorporate them into their workflows.

There are two types of activities available:

• Convention Check
• SharePoint File Upload

For the setup of the ‘Model Guideline Check’ go to the organization settings in Process Governance, go to activities and select ‘Model Guideline Check’ from the drop-down menu.

Click on ‘Add configuration’ and fill out the necessary fields. For the email you should pick an admin. Please note that if the user is deleted the email needs to be updated as well.

Possible outputs are:

• 'Guideline check error’ as a true or false statement
• 'Guideline check musts’ returning the number of found errors in the diagram, based on the selected convention check
• 'Guideline check warnings’ returning the number of found warnings in the diagram, based on the selected convention check
• 'Guideline check hints’ returning the number of found hints in the diagram, based on the selected convention check

Click on "Test" to see if it works.

To configure the SharePoint File Upload activity, you must first store the SharePoint credentials. To do this, go to the Credentials tab and add the necessary login information.

Here, you configure the credentials for SharePoint, enabling you to upload files automatically to your SharePoint within a workflow. When setting up the credentials, it’s important to provide a name and a secret key. The secret key is used to store sensitive information, such as passwords, and SAP Support does not have access to this key.

For more details about credentials, please refer to the SAP Signavio Process Governance User Guide.

After creating your SharePoint credentials, switch back to the Activities tab to configure your task for uploading files to SharePoint.

After configuring the settings in the dialog window and filling in the required fields, you must activate the activity by selecting the checkbox. If you don't check the box, the activity cannot be used in the workflow.

When setting up your approval workflow you can now use the "external activity" and integrate the configured activities. In order to add an external activity, you have to switch to your workflow. Choose either the Activity Model Guideline Check or the SharePoint File Upload, which was previously configured.

After selecting the Model Guideline Check, choose the configured guideline check. In the Inputs dialog, open the Guideline dropdown to select the modeling convention for your convention check. These conventions are sourced from your SAP Signavio Process Manager. To reuse the model ID, select the assigned attribute by clicking on the hashtag symbol and choosing the corresponding model ID.

In the outputs menu set up as follows:

• ‘Guideline check error’ as a true or false statement
• ‘Guideline check musts’ returning the number of found errors in the diagram, based on the selected convention check
• ‘Guideline check warnings’ returning the number of found warnings in the diagram, based on the selected convention check
• ‘Guideline check hints’ returning the number of found hints in the diagram, based on the selected convention check Configure possible outputs according to the available outputs mentioned earlier (guideline check musts/ warnings/ hints). E.g. create a new number field error which returns the number of errors in the diagram.

Use the error attribute to configure a gateway. If the error is bigger than 0, then send an email to the person who started the workflow that the model has been automatically rejected and does not meet the modeling convention standard. Otherwise continue in the workflow.

In this section, we'll explore Services & Connectors, which allow you to establish interfaces with other systems. To access this feature, click on your initials and select "Services and Connectors." In the following we will focus on system and data integration for internal and third-party systems. You can allow systems to participate and read out data during workflow execution.

In the Services & Connectors section you will also need to set up the integration to the SAP Signavio Process Manager. By activating dictionary categories The SAP Signavio Process Governance module has access to the entries and read or modify entries and categories.

Data connectors allow to fetch data from third-party systems and use it in workflows. You, as the administrator of SAP Signavio Process Governance can set this up. To learn more about the Connectors, check out the SAP Signavio Process Governance Developer Guide Custom data Connectors.

It is also possible to provide read-only access to data used in third-party systems for reporting purposes. This API tokens are generated under the tab Token Management. To learn more about the Tokens Management, check out the SAP Signavio Process Governance Developer Guide Token Management.

A very similar concept, by establishing a connection to third-party systems, is that you integrate SAP Signavio Process Manager for different reasons. This is done in the admin settings, under the tab SAP Signavio Process Manager Integration.

• Triggering approval for processes before being published in SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub. This will be necessary as soon as you have implemented an approval workflow in SAP Signavio Process Manager.

• Integrating Dictionary categories to enrich workflows, for example with Risks & Controls or documents that are maintained in the dictionary. Workflow participants can use this information directly in the form for further processing.

When you access this option, you will see that the system user account cannot be empty for integrating SAP Signavio Process Manager in Process Governance. So, adding a user account will be your first thing to do.