SRM - Offline approval of shopping baskets (avoid automatic email)

[Former Member]

Dear colleagues,

We are implementing SRM 5.0 and one of the key functionalities is the so-called "offline approval": the authorizer receives an email with the information of the basket he/she has to approve or reject. This email actually contains 3 links: one for approval, one for rejection, and another one to access the system (SRM).

When accepting or rejecting the shopping basket (that is, when clicking on any of the links for approval or rejection) the system automatically generates an email with a default text in the Subject and in the Body of the email. The user can INSERT some comments in the middle of the proposed character chain. Example of email generated:

Send to: administrator@ourcompany.com

Subject: #EBP_GEN_REPLY#Reject of a work item

Body:

#WFTECHINFOS#444244093D34D87D43D6572D4#WFTECHINFOE#You can write a note#NOTM#Regards.

That is, the user can write a text replacing the "You can write a note". If, for whatever reason, the user deletes any of the other characters, or any character in the Subject, or writes the comments in the wrong position, deleting a "#", etc, the process will not work.

On the other hand, it is quite unlikely that the user needs to write a comment. Normally, he/she just approves or rejects, without comments.

Therefore, this email is unnecessary and dangerous indeed, as it is quite likely that the proposed characters will be deleted or overwritten by mistake, and the process (either approval or rejection) will not work.

We want to avoid this email, ideally making it work in the background, so that the user does not even see it, and does not even have the possibility to modify those characters or overwrite them. This is absolutely business-critical.

This is of course a modification to standard SAP. Do you have any idea what we have to do to avoid the email?

THANKS in advance.

Ray

[Former Member]

I am currently working on making this off line approval work in our SRM implementiation. It appears to me that you have to do several steps to turn this e-mail notification on, and not doing these steps keeps the e-mail from being sent.

In other words, the DEFAULT is no e-mail. Then, the users can access their SAP Workplace inbox to answer tasks. Please let me know if this helps and correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi Rick,

Thanks for your message, but this is not really what I meant.

We need the authorizer to receive an email with the message: "You have a shopping cart pending for approval, with these items ...item 1, item 2, etc... Do you want to approve? Yes / No".

We have managed to turn on this message, which is fine. The problem, however, comes when pressing Yes or No (which can be either a link or a button, depending on your email service, e.g. in Lotus Notes we get links, but I know that in Outlook you would get buttons). When you press 'yes' or 'no' we would expect that the system automatically approves or rejects the basket in SRM with no intermediate email which may be manipulated by the user. That is: you press 'yes' and the system approves the basket in SRM, no matter if the communication is via email behind, but the goal is to avoid that the user may see or manipulate the email.

The same with the rejection: the user should press 'No' and no intermediate email should be visible to the user.

I know for certain that this requires a modification to the standard, but the question is where and how.

Thanks again!

Ray

[Former Member]

Ray,

I'm not 100% positive, but I don't think there's any other way to do what you want without the e-mail being sent back to your SAP system.

I think the e-mail model is SAP's model for offline approvals.

Just guessing, It may be able to be done programatically, but would require some sort of link sent from the workflow to the person's inbox that would somehow call an in-house written application/web page that would then connect back to your SAP system and complete the workitem.

That would require quite a bit of development on your side, but I would assume could be done.

I don't think there's a pre-developed way to do what you want provided by SAP. If there is, I'd love it, because I'm not real comfortable with the reply e-mail model either.

Sorry I wasn't much help.

Rick