Travel request approval workflow

[former_member196651]

Hi Experts,

I am trying to configure a Travel Request Approval workflow scenario for my client. After a detailed analysis and a search through community, I understood that the standard travel request approval workflows are WS20000040 & WS20000050. But after reading all the stuff, I am confused and is having full of doubts. So I need your expert opinion to solve my following doubts:

1) If WS20000050 is for travel request approval, then what is the use of WS20000040?

2) Got an info from the community that, WS20000050 is triggered if we are using transaction PR04 for travel request creation and WS20000040 will be triggered if we use transaction TRIP. Is that true?

3) Whether these workflows are meant for portal use only or we can use the same in ECC side also? Because I need the approvel at ECC side only.

4) After an analysis, I understood that these are single level approval workflows. Is that true? Can we convert this to multi level workflows by some customizations?

Requesting all the experts to clarify my doubts with detailed explanations to each questions.

Regards,

Abijith

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Abijit,

1. WS20000050 for travel request and WS20000040 for travel expense report.

2. I didn't remember which transaction code is used for travel expense.

    The below links may help you.

Overall Process of Travel Management - Travel Management (FI-TV) - SAP Library

3. We can use these workflows for ECC side also. I think PRAP tcode is used to approve the trips.

4. Standard Travel request workflow is for only 1 level approval and expense report workflow having 2 level approvals. We can customize these based on our requirement.

Regards,

Murali Krishna.

[former_member201570 · Accepted solution]

Hi Abijith,

Transaction code for travel expense is PR05. As the workflow have 1 level approval  for T Request  and 2 level expense , we have to copy the workflow and change according to our requirement . We can use the standard task for approval process (TS20000118 ) of Travel request and standard task for check trip ,change trip and approve trip for expense workflow. Need to change only the agent picking logic . If any further clarification let me know.

Regards,

Shamsudheen.

[former_member196651]

Dear All,

Thanks for your replies. Now I am clear about the workflow for Travel request approval, it is WS20000050 as Murali suggested. It is single level approval workflow.

@Shamsu,

Thanks for the suggestion. I got your point. We need to copy the standard workflow and convert the same to a multi level workflow. I will try that.

Thanks to Karri also for giving suggestions.

So when I create a multi level approval workflow, should I use a loop for going through different levels.

Thanks & Regards,

Abijith

[Former Member]

Using loop is one alternative. Loop is good in that sense that the amount of approvals can be dynamic, so if some documents need just one level of approval, but some need three, this can easily be implemented with a loop.

There is one important thing what you should consider when implementing multilevel approval (this applies also other processes than travel approvals). The approval application might change the status of the document to approved, so this something that you need to consider because most likely you don't want the status to change before all the approvals have been done.

Regards,

Karri

[Former Member]

Hi,

The travel workflows are started via events (or at least they used to be). This means that it doesn't really matter where you create/save the travel request/expense - saving the trip creates an event and your workflow starts (if it has been linked to a workflow in transaction SWETYPV).

You can do some tests. Just turn on the event monitor SWELS, and create some trips. See the created events in event monitor SWEL.

3) See above. The workflow(s) should start from ECC too.

4) Most likely you need a workflow developer to do some adjustments to workflow(s). The standard workflow templates hardly never work as they are. Normally you need to make a copy of the standard template and start using the copy. This is not a big deal and you can easily start using the copy - just change the link between the events and workflows in SWETYPV.

Regards,

Karri