Workflow for Maintenance of records

[Former Member]

What is the best practice for MDM workflows for Product Master data maintenance? This is specifically about manual vs automatic workflow trigger.

Automatic Trigger - As and when record change, workflow trigger. No Need for people to go manually and initiate the workflow. Easy for user(s) to maintain. But with this, we will loose the functionality (Compare from original Records) as records change happen before trigger. We never know what changes made in user friendly manner.

Manual Trigger - Item needs to be attached manually to maintenance workflow. User needs to know about this step and have this additional work. This will not work, if somebody is changing record on portal. But this way, we will use the functionality for (Compare from original records) as record change happen after workflow trigger.

Any suggestion?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I would say that still you can trigger automatically based on Record Import/Add/Update; but kindly make sure that you have built powerful validations to compare the new values Vs Original.

This is possible in MDM. Let me know if you need to know more abt this.

thanks

Alexander

[Former Member]

Hi,

In both cases i.e. Manual and Automatic, you can Check out the record (by selecting Checkout at the start step of the workflow) and once the record is Checked out you can compare this with the original one by right clicking on the checked out record and selecting the property Checkin/Checkout -> All Versions or you can simply right click on the record and select compare with Original.

Regards,

Jitesh Talreja

[Former Member]

Thanks Guys for the updates -

Jitesh - Once you check out the record in automatic process. you can use functionality Compare from original Records but it will show what was changed already, as records change happen before trigger.

Eventually, on first step, if changes made, we will not be able to find what is changed

[Former Member]

Hi,

You are absolutely correct, but triggering of MDM workflow is completely based on the business requirement. If you can define roughly your requirement we can try to find out the solution. Also you can have more than one stop step in MDM workflow and both can have different response for Checked out record i.e. records can be checked in or Roll back. We can make use of validations which decide whether to check in the record or rol back to original.

Regards,

Jitesh Talreja

[Former Member]

Hi Rt,

If you compare Automatic Importing to Manual importing.

Automatic will be the prefered option as any business process will prefer Automation over manual due to serveral reasons some of them being lesser manual error,Less time better efficiency etc.

If you have a set of say 1 million records and in a delta import process say 10000 records gets changed.If you wish to run a maintainence workflow on these 10000 records mnaully will be a hectic and tedious task.

On the other hand if you have set the trigger to automatic trigger action for record update.Automatically these updated records will move to the workflow.

If you really wnat to keep a track of the updated records you can try using one of the below strategies:

- Enable change tracking wherein you will be able to view the old value and new valueof the changed records.

Kindly refer the below link:

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_mdm550/helpdata/en/45/c7b20339ee570ae10000000a114a6b/frameset.htm (change tracker)

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_mdm550/helpdata/en/45/c87d0243e56f75e10000000a1553f6/frameset.htm (Change Tracker Configuration)

- Use a time stamp field which will get updated everytime a records gets modified for a particular field.

Hope It Helped

Thanks & Regards

Simona Pinto

[Former Member]

Can you please elaborate - how we can built validations to compare the new values Vs Original?