What Are the Benefits of Using SAP Business Workflow?

SAP Business Workflow is an integral part of the SAP Business Suite, yet many companies don't take advantage of it. Not only do you have a powerful business workflow engine at your disposal, using it can deliver numerous benefits. Below are a few important benefits of using SAP Business Workflow:

. Consistency - By defining specific workflows in SAP Business Workflow, you can ensure consistency. For example, you could use SAP Business Workflow to define every step that needs to be followed in your hiring process. You could do the same for setting up a new customer or for issuing credit.

. Improved auditing and compliance - If your company is subject to government, corporate, or industry-specific regulations, having defined business processes in place can help to ensure compliance as well as provide proof that all required steps were followed.

. Ease of use - Many SAP applications include predefined business workflows that you can use either as-is or by editing them to best meet your company's needs. Not only is it easy to create and use workflows, your end-users are already comfortable with the SAP interface. Thus, the learning curve for SAP Business Workflow is much lower than it would be with an external system.

. SAP Business Workflow can serve as your System of Record - By using workflows directly in SAP, there's no need to gather information from diverse sources or synchronize data from external systems.

. Using SAP Business Workflow taps into the systems you already have in place - From user roles and permissions to data backup and recovery, everything that you have already set up for use with SAP Business Suite applies to SAP Business Workflow. This reduces duplication, controls costs (why buy a third party business workflow solution when you already have one?), and allows you to use other SAP tools such as data validation and verification. Since your SAP system is already set up for maximum availability and is backed up regularly, the same is true of your business workflows within SAP. With a third party solution, you'd need to plan for security, availability and disaster recovery.

In order to realize these benefits, start using SAP Business Workflow; it's as easy as that.

Video: How to create an SAP workflow



Works Cited:

1. SAP, "An introduction to SAP Business Workflow," - http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-31056

2. Dolphin, "SAP® Business Workflow: Top 10 Reasons For Using SAP Business Workflow Engine," - http://www.dolphin-corp.com/top-10-reasons-why-using-sap-business-workflow/