SAP standard workflows are preconfigured templates within the SAP system that define a series of sequential steps required to complete a specific business process.
These workflows cover a wide range of business functions, such as purchasing, sales, human resources, finance, and more. They are designed based on best practices and industry standards, providing organizations with a solid foundation for automating their processes. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the details of how to search for standard SAP-provided workflows and cover what the commonly used standard workflows are.
Now you’ll see how to find standard workflows in an SAP system (this can be either SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA) via standard Transaction SWDM (Business Workflow Explorer). Here, you can search by using filters such as application component, business object, and classes (including methods).
The figure below illustrates Transaction SWDM (for business application purchasing) where you can see the list of workflow templates available in the Business Workflow Explorer screen.
You can search for standard tasks from table HRS1000, as shown in the next figure. Go to Transaction SE16 or Transaction SE16N, and then use the following filter criteria: Std.object type as “WS”, Language as “EN”, User Name as “SAP”, and Object abbr. as “MM*” to find out all the standard workflow templates in the material management area.
The next figure shows the result of the selections you made. It lists all SAP-provided standard workflow templates in the material management area.
Note: You can search all standard tasks the same way using the standard object type of “TS” in table HRS1000.
Let’s consider another way to search SAP-provided standard workflows. Say you’re looking to find out all the SAP purchasing workflows. Go to Transaction PFTC, provide Task type as “Workflow Template”, and click the (F4) help of the Task field. This will open a popup where you need to enter the Search Term as “*PURCH*” and click the green checkmark. In another window, you’ll see the results where workflow Object name or object description contains the word “PURCH”, and you can thus get a tentative list of purchasing workflows. The figure below shows the list of purchasing workflow templates from Transaction PFTC.
Note: This will return both standard and custom workflows, so you’ll need to determine which are standard workflows by checking inside the workflow template.
SAP has provided a good number of standard classical workflow templates in different functional areas such as purchasing, finance, travel management, HR, and so on. The table below lists some of the common standard classical workflows that are used in different SAP S/4HANA implementations.
Note: The workflow template numbers given in the preceding list may vary based on the SAP system version.
Editor’s note: This post has been adapted from a section of the book Workflow for SAP S/4HANA by Sabyasachi Dutta, Nilay Ghosh, Kousik Goon, Sandip Jana, Arindam Mukherjee, Srinivas Rao, Yogeendar Rao, Yogesh Sane, Naveen Veshala, and Kiran Viswanathan.