Usage of Process Owner

[Former Member]

Hi Experts,

While working with the concept of workflow, I came across the term process owner. As per the help document provided by SAP in the sourcing system, the process owner is the one who triggers the workflow and executes the workflow script.

But this definition is a little ambigous to understand. Hence, it would be greatful if somebody can answer my following queries regarding the workflow process owner.

What is the advantage we will be deriving if we have a workflow process owner separately?

We know that it's used to trigger the daemon, but why SAP has introduced and recommends to maintain a single process owner , will it improve workflow process daemon by adding always a single account as process owner? What’s the reason behind recommendation?

Are we going to lose anything if we don’t have a workflow process owner maintained?

Why should the process owner not be given login rights? But by default if there is no context specific process owner added, then the document owner is added as the process owner. If it is a recommendation , we are always allowing owner of the document who becomes the process owner to login at present. Will this lead to any security vulnerability?

Thanks in advance!

Vaishali Soni

[vikram_shanmugasundaram]

Hi Vaishali,

As far as I know there is no real advantage in having a separate user as the process owner. In the implementations I have been involved in, I’ve always created a separate user for process owner. But I have seen others where this was not done and workflows worked just fine. I guess, by using a separate user and providing all the required access, maybe there is less chance of running into issues.

If you don’t use a separate user for process owner, there is no functionality lost. System performance is not affected and there is no change in the behavior of the workflow.

Typically, a special user account is created specifically to be used for process owner user in workflow. Since there is no real need for someone to login as this user, it is better turn off login.

I hope this provides some clarification. 

Regards,

Vikram