Name: Utilising Deadline Monitoring in Flexible Workflow - S/4HANA Cloud Sourcing and Procurement
Uploaded: 2020-11-9
Duration: 533 s
Description: In this Microlearning you'll learning how to set up deadline notifications in your workflow approval processes.

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<div>In this Microlearning you'll learning how to set up deadline notifications in your workflow approval processes. <br><br><br><ul></ul></div>

Utilising Deadline Monitoring in Flexible Workflow - S/4HANA Cloud Sourcing and Procurement

Hi there, Welcome to my microlearning on utilizing deadline monitoring, in flexible workflows in SAP S/4HANA Cloud. My name is Beth Grant and I am a consultant at the S/4HANA Cloud services team based in London. Today, I'll be looking at how to implement and use deadline notifications in your workflow scenarios. This session is aimed at a range of people from system administrators to those who simply have an interest in workflow handling in S/4HANA Cloud. If we go to the agenda, I'd like to cover the following. Firstly, I'll explain the two different types of deadlines you can set up. Then we'll move on and I'll show you how we can notify approvers of such deadlines. And following on from that, I'll briefly mention the prerequisites to maintaining an e-mail template for deadlines. I'll conclude by tying up all of this theory and jumping into the S/4HANA Cloud system. I'll show you a demo on how to set up a workflow with a deadline. There are two types of deadlines. You can set up in S/4HANA Cloud. If we look on the left-hand side of the screen, we can see the first type, which is at workflow level. This means that the deadline calculation will begin for all of the steps immediately after the workflow is triggered. To explain this further, let's look at an example using a purchase order workflow. So you want to set up a workflow, which is for approval steps. And at the fourth step, you wish to maintain the deadline at 24 h. This means that this 24-hour deadline will start as soon as the purchase order enters, even the first level of approval. In comparison to this, if we look to the right-hand side of the screen, we can see the second type of deadline. This is defined as step level. For this type of deadline, the calculation will begin as soon as a particular step is executed. So let's make more sense of that and use the following example of setting up a purchase order workflow. Again, you wish to set up a workflow which has four approval steps. The first step, you may change the deadline at 24 h. This means that the deadline for the fourth step will only start once the purchase order reaches the fourth level of approval. With this type of deadline, the time spent on previous steps is not taken into consideration. The next topic looks at how we can notify approvers is of such deadlines. The top left image shows a screenshot of my inbox. By navigating to this app, you'll be able to see any tasks which are assigned to you. And if they are overdue, they'll be labelled in red. As you can see on the screenshots. It is also possible to see if an item is overdue by entering it the document which is waiting for approval. If you navigate to the Approval Details tab of say, a purchase order, you'll be able to see "overdue" written in red if a document has exceeded a deadline. Finally, on the top right-hand side, you'll see an example of an email you can set up which can be triggered to approvers if a workflow is overdue. As mentioned, it is possible to set up an e-mail which can be triggered to approvers to let them know about an approval which is needed. In order to do this, you must navigate to the correct template, which is listed on the screen. You can access this through the app, maintain email templates. For more information on how to set this up and the technical details required, there'll be another microlearning coming out to explain this. Let's now jump into a demo. The first thing that we need to do is to login to S/4HANA Cloud as the role configuration expert so that we can access the app Manage Workflows for Purchase Orders. Within this app, we can immediately see a list of workflows which you have already set up in your system. To add a new workflow, simply click at the top right and go ahead and enter any mandatory information. You can maintain any properties that you wish here. For this example under just start conditions, I maintain this for the purchasing group of the purchase order is using the example purchasing group 001. Next we will enter our steps where we can incorporate the deadlines. I'll go ahead and create just one step for this example, selecting Add. We will change this step type from automatic so I can select my user in order to in order to approve. I'll go ahead and change role to user, and I'll search for my user and select okay. Under the step conditions, I will again use the purchasing group as a set condition. Purchasing group of purchase order is using the example purchasing group 001. Here is where we can add in our deadline. Select Add and you'll see the two types of approval which I explained earlier. We have overall and step. For this example, I will maintain this deadline at 12h. But you do have the options to use minutes or days. The last drop-down gives you the option of either marking the step as overdue or sending an e-mail notification. So that's all my data and information maintained. And I can go ahead and select, Create. And I'll make sure to add this step into my workflow. From a deadline point of view, the workflow is now fine to be saved and also activated. I will also define the order so that this workflow now appears at the top of the list by selecting the final order. Here we can see the workflow now at the top of this workflow list. Next, we can create a purchase order to see how the deadline looks. If you log in to S/4HANA Cloud as a purchaser role, you can access the app Managed Purchase Orders. For this example, I'll copy a pre-existing purchase order. So I can select my purchase order and hit Copy. I'll show that this purchase order uses the correct purchasing group 001 as maintained in the workflow. And I'll order. So now we can see that the status of this purchase order is in approval. And as mentioned, If you head to the tab approval details on the right-hand side here, you can see the deadline which is in place. So as you can see here, the deadline for this purchase order is in 12 h as we set up in our purchase order workflow. For this microlearning, I already created some purchase orders which have now surpassed the deadlines. And I can show you this by logging into S/4HANA Cloud as a purchasing manager and accessing the app, my inbox. As you can see on the left-hand side, these purchase order  items are now overdue, and this is shown with a red label. And of course, don't forget, it is also possible to set up the e-mail notifications for deadlines using the app, Maintain Email Templates. You will require the administrator role for this. That's all for the demo. Let's get back to the slides. Let's conclude what I've covered in this microlearning. I started off by explaining the two different types of deadlines. I then covered the different ways you can notify approvers of deadlines and what is needed to maintain an e-mail template for deadlines. And finally, I run you through a brief demo in the S/4HANA Cloud system. In terms of further learning, there are other microlearnings which cover workflows. There will also be a microlearning  coming out which covers the technical side of configuring email messages for workflows. With that, I'd like to thank you for listening and I'll see you on the next microlearning.