DMS Approvals Outside of Workflow

[Former Member]

My particular issue relates to DMS, but I suppose that the scope of the issues is in fact more broad.

I have a DMS network controlled by workflow. DIRs are routed to users for review. A work item is placed in their SAP Inbox, and when they click on the workitem, they are brought to the DIR where they can change the status (Approve or Reject.)

Reviewers have a security role assigned which allows them to access the DIR in change mode.

My issue is this: Knowledgeable users can simply go to transaction CV02N and change the status. If they do this, they completely bypass the work item in their SAP inbox, and the workflow never proceeds.

I need to be able to restrict access to the DIR unless they are accessing through the inbox.

Has anyone here solved a similar issue?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Bill

You can setup the workflow to be ended by a change of status. This should ensure that should people go via CV02N, the workflow is completed anyway. This would be a better solution as is one person is away and someone else needs to go in an approve the document then at least you can still do this even if its not sitting in their inbox.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

We have an interesting approval structure. While people may have access to CV02N for a particular doc type, they might not be part of the approval chain for a particular document that is being routed.

Imagine that there are 3 groups of people.

10 Regulatory Reviewers

10 Product Safety Reviewers

10 Statistics Reviewers.

The author of a DIR picks one person from each group to route

the document to for approval. Each gets the work item simultaneously.

If they process through their inbox, the workflow works correctly.

If they process outside their inbox, the workflow does never proceeds (eventually times out due to deadline monitor.)

If someone else in their group gets curious, they can make a change to the DIR outside the control of the workflow, potentially messing things up (status network is automated, but if you approve directly through CV02N, the status can be set to something it shouldn't.

Desired behavior: If a valid user does an approval directly through CV02N, we should complete the work item and pull it from their inbox.

If an invalid user does an approval directly through CV02N, the system will log it, and the workflow should react to return the status of the DIR to "In Review" so that the proper reviewers can complete their review.

I suspect this can be accomplished using Asynchronous tasks and terminating events. I am curious if anyone else has solved something of similiar complexity. This is more of a workflow question than a DMS question, but DMS users who work with the system long enough will probably come up against this sooner or later.

Edited by: Bill Bessette on Aug 15, 2008 4:43 PM

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

There are a couple of issues you'll encounter with this.

The first one is easy to solve and one we come across often...you can put an authorisation on the entry to the DIR from non-authorised approvers who still have access to the DIR. i.e. a check to see if they are one of the users listed in the characteristics of that particular DIR, if they are not, don't allow them access and this effectively removes their option to accidentally approve.

For the second problem, an option to use could be a user exit on save which checks the person's inbox for a work item associated with that object and either asks the user if they would like to complete the work item when they click save, or completes it for them automatically.

I have encountered workflow issue before but unfortunately it was a while ago and I can't remember exactly how we solved it but I think it involved double statuses and creating individual workflow events that can still be terminated centrally with a particular status change but I know it did involve extensive work from the workflow consultant.