what is your experiences with workflow

altquark

altquark

Legendary Poster
Ok - this is a very generic question, I know, but theres some method to my generality. Workflow has changed dramatically over the past few releases - but seems to have brought some of the old bad feelings along for the ride. So, is workflow a good part of E1 to implement these days ?

I'm specifically talking 9.0 and above. In the past, workflow required a lot of development effort and didnt really provide what the sales team promised - it was clunky and required a lot of maintenance. But how is it today ? Are you happy with your implementation of workflow ???!!!!
 
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Ok - this is a verygeneric question, i know, but theres some method to me generality. Workflow has changed dramatically over the past few releases - but seems to have brought some of the old feelings along for the ride. So, is workflow a good part of E1 to implement these days ? I'm specifically talking 9.0 and above. In the past, workflow required a lot of development effort and didnt really provide what the sales team promised - it was clunky and required alot of maintenance. But how is it today ? Are you happy with your implementation of workflow ???!!!!

[/ QUOTE ]

Hi Jon,

Interesting topic, at the client I am working at now, they are going through a workflow exercise. The client had workflow for XE. Intially it was thought that they could just port it across to 9.0 and retrofit. They found that the XE workflow was junk, so the developers are rebuilding workflow from scratch.

- Gregg
 
Thats actually the common theme i've seen in the past - and its what most people think of workflow - xe's was clunky and usually required tens of thousands of hours of development to get working (or complete rewrites) - but the latest versions have a completely different workflow modeler etc - is it easier to implement ? It LOOKS cool, and simple workflow sells itself really well, but is it just sales fluff ?
 
Hi Jon,

I have worked at a few clients (8.9 through 8.11 ) in the past that used workflow pretty extensively. Worked pretty good , the modeler is easy to use, allows multiple routings based on conditions etc. Promoted fine through OMW also.

Workflow performance is very sensitive to the response time on the workflow tables and the process activity master table - F98810, tends to get very big very fast in an environment with substantial workflow activity , so purging this table periodically is key
 
great suggestion on the F98810 - if we use workflow, I'll look out for that (performance is usually pretty easy to fix one way or another !)

My question is about how the use of Workflow actually works from a development perspective. For example, if a customer wants approval for an addressbook entry - lets say, an Employee type, the addressbook doesn't necessarily have an "effective from" date - so how does workflow actually take the un-approved entry, move it off to the side (so that the rest of the system cannot see it yet) and then move it back in as an approved employee ?

My guess is that this occurs by changing the AB Type from, say a "X" to an "E" - but then that would incur development of a process to change the AB Type. This might not be a good example (I'm not a business person) - but if that simple request requires development, how much of the rest of the system requires development to implement workflow ?!
 
I guess each scenario might be handled differently. But essentially a change to the system that requires workflow approval , does not get written to the database until the workflow has been approved.

For example an AR user wishes to increase the credit limit of a customer , which requires the approval of the manager if the new credit limit is greater than X amount.

This new amount and customer info are stored in some table (Ambiguous I know , but that's my best bet), which could be a workflow table it self . If the manager approves , the workflow process will call an NER to update to the customer information.

But till the time this is approved , the customer will still have the old credit limit.

I may be wrong about how it works under the covers in terms of where and how it holds the temporary information , maybe some of the developers on here might have a better idea.

If you want to look at the 8.98 Workflow Tools Guide , search for sol id - 1248894.1 on the support site
 
Thankyou for the link to the knowledge doc. Been perusing this.

I've made a new post regarding this on the functional board. We have workflow set up in our sandbox now, but we still feel that modifying workflow for a simple request - such as an addressbook approval process - entails a certain amount of development AND requires modification of vanilla objects (such as P01012). I'd love to hear others' view on this....
 
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